)e 



THE 



HEART OF THE CONTINENT 



A RECORD OF TRAVEL ACROSS THE 
PLAINS AND IN OREGON, 



EXAMINATION OF THE MORMON PRINCIPLE. 



BT 

FITZ HUGH LUDLOW. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 



NEW YORK: 

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON. 

Camfirtlrse; SRtbcriStOc T^xti6, 

1870. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by 

Hdrd and Houghton, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York 



RIVERSIBE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BT 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANI. 



TO THE READER 



It was my original intention to have published 
these notes of my journey in the two-volume form, 
comprehending much additional material which would 
have made the work a complete and minute survey 
not only of the entire region traversed by the Pa- 
cific Railroad, but of much of the incalculably valu- 
ble and interesting region tributary to it on either 
side. Of the latter part of my journey, — after leav- 
ing Salt Lake City, — I have here, however, had room 
to give only the more salient features ; and by the 
same circumstances which rendered it advisable to 
reduce the book to a single volume, I have been com- 
pelled to throw much of the matter relating to the 
Mormons, their home, their problem, and their destiny, 
into what to most readers is the least attractive and 
most superficially noticed form — an Appendix. 

It is principally on behalf of this Appendix that I 
utter a word of prefatory remark. The engrossing 
question, " What shall we do with the Mormons ?' ' 
is, so far as I know from personal reading and infor- 
mation obtained at the best hands, treated in this 
Appendix from an entirely new point of view. I may 
say frankly that I believe my solution of the question 
the promptest, the most feasible, the least productive 



IV TO THE READER. 

of violent dislocation and suffering, which has yet 
been offered. Because I so believe and am desirous 
to have the fact tested by other minds, and because 
there is much in the small type at the other end of 
my book which is full as worthy of the larger typo- 
graphical honors as anything which precedes it, — be- 
cause, in fine, I think the reader will agree with me 
in calling the Mormon Matter at least as interesting 
as the rest of the volume, I here venture to ask that 
it may be read at least no more superficially than that. 

F. H. L. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAQK 
THE SETTING OUT 1 

CHAPTER H. 

COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT 23 

CHAPTER m. 

FROM THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES . . . 102 

CHAPTER IV. 

pike's PIKE AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS .... 139 

CHAPTER V. 

INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 191 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY 236 

CHAPTER VH. 

THE NEW JERUSALEM 315 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE DEAD SEA. — THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY 

'OF ITS BASIN 376 

CHAPTER IX. 

SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE 409 



Yl CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER X. 

PAOB 
ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON ... ... 445 

CHAPTER XL 

ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER . . . . ,. • • • 473 

APPENDIX 503 



THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE SETTING OUT. 

I MIGHT pass over without a word the whole line of 
railway communication between New York and Atchi- 
son, on the Missouri River, were it not that the uniform 
kindness of its officers to the party of which I was 
a member, and their interest in the artistic and scien- 
tific purposes of our expedition, deserve to be as well 
known by our acknowledgment, as their roads are 
without our mention. 

The moment that we stated our project to Mr. Scott 
and the other officers of the Pennsylvania Central, 
they not only presented the entire party with trans- 
portation over their own road to Pittsburg, but gave 
us letters of introduction which insured our being 
treated with similar courtesy on all the remaining 
roads to St. Louis. 

To them, to the officers of the Crestline route be- 
tween Pittsburg and Cincinnati, and to Messrs. Larned 
and M' Alpine of the Cincinnati and St. Louis road, 
we owe recognition, no less for the fine spirit of ap- 
preciation and helpfulness in which they received our 
enterprise, than for the diminution effected by their 
kindness in the burdens of a necessarily very expen- 
sive journey. There can scarcely be a better indica- 

1 N 



2 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

tion for the future of Science, Art, and Literature in 
our country, than the cordiality which such a course 
as that of these gentlemen shows existing between 
those professions and Commerce. I might add that 
Commerce herself has reason to note this indication 
as gladly ; for Science, Art, and Literature are daugh- 
ters of the same mature civilization as she, and to- 
gether they flourish or decay. 

At St. Louis we found a letter awaiting us from 
Colonel William Osborne, formerly of the Hannibal 
and St. Joseph's road and then President of the Platte 
County Railroad, extending between St. Joseph and 
the Missouri border opposite Atchison. This letter 
introduced us to Mr. Sturgeon, President of the North- 
ern Railroad of Missouri, and, by the combined cour- 
tesy of these gentlemen, we were forwarded freely all 
the way to the Kansas terminus of railway communi- 
cation. I shall have other such courtesies to ac- 
knowledge as our journey proceeds. 

At St. Joseph we completed our outfit by the pur- 
chase of additional blankets and ammunition ; and 
after a few pleasant days spent in a family of personal 
friends, went down by rail to the starting-point of our 
Overland Journey. 

Atchison is a small town, but a lively one. We had 
scarcely touched the ferry-wharf on the Kansas side 
before we were invited to a hanging. Lynch, C. J., 
was to sit that afternoon upon a couple of bushwhack- 
ers. His is a most impartial tribunal, which, to avoid 
giving offense, acquits nobody. The accused were, 
first, a man of fifty-five or thereabouts, a gray person 
who, in a more advanced state of society, might have 
bulled the gold market and cheated his acquaintance 
under the asgis of eminent respectability without the 



THE SETTING OUT. 3 

wa'gging of a reprobative tongue ; second, a young 
fellow of imperturbable address, whom Wall Street 
would have esteemed highly in the position of con- 
fidential clerk to the foregoing. Neither of them had 
any look of the popularly conceived criminal, — prob- 
ably neither of them were any worse than fifty men 
in the crowd who clamored for their death. I heard 
one man, enthusiastic upon the even-handed justice 
of the occasion, who, if he had the theme of his eulogy 
meted to himself, would swing higher than Haman, or 
leave locks of his gray hair dabbled in blood upon 
every threshold in Atchison, — a man with the effron- 
tery to live under the very noses of citizens whose 
crape for brothers slaughtered by him in the border- 
ruffian times was scarce yet rusty on their wide-awakes. 
I speak thus, not because I deprecate stern frontier 
justice, but because the hands which administer it are 
nerved, almost invariably, by brute fury or caprice. 
In a new country, the indomitable pioneers who build 
the basement of civilization, have too much to do with 
subduing nature to bother their heads especially re- 
garding government. But government, while man- 
kind stays selfish, never can regulate itself While 
the workers are felling trees, breaking roads, and 
building cabins, the knaves and do-nothings get into 
political power. Before long the judge sits only to 
intimidate the just and excuse the villain. The sher- 
iff's baton becomes a finger-post to loop-holes for the 
•escape of thieves and murderers. The jury and the 
malefactor wink at each other across a rail. The gov- 
ernor stands waiting with a pardon to poke a hole 
through the coarse legal sieve which has casually 
caught an exceptional rascal across a wire. The legis- 
lature pass laws with cunning quirks in them, provi- 



4 THE HEART OF THE COKTINENT. 

dent against a day when these shall be convenient for 
themselves. When this occurs, and the honest men 
find it out, Lynch-law is the only practical transition 
to a good form of government. A most horrible thing 
in the abstract, it becomes the sole thing in the con- 
crete. Perhaps it is essential to it that it should in 
most cases be administered by a furious mob ; but that 
is the most horrible part of its horror to a stranger. 

Nearly two thousand people were assembled in a 
deep ravine indented in the rolling plain back of the 
town, around a lone cotton-wood tree, under which 
stood the fatal wagon. Such a dreadful multitude 
may God keep from the death-scene of every man 
whose guilt is not double-dyed ! There was no attempt 
to classify it. Shaggy-bearded horsemen trampled 
under hoof swarming footmen, boys, and, shame to 
say it, women. Here and there stood the unhitched 
wagons of whole families who had come in from dis- 
tant ranches to make gala-day of the execution. 
These were the objects of general envy, for the view 
from their pedestals was not only more commanding, 
but more comfortable. It was a selfish sort of enjoy- 
ment to sit one's saddle at such a place. Stern Jus- 
tice and Domestic Felicity were both satisfied in the 
little family party which sat — grown people on boards, 
children on knees, babes in arms — cracking grim 
jokes with each other till the dreadful melodrama 
should begin. 

The trial was a short one. It was testified that the 
two accused had proceeded to the ranche of an old 
farmer living twenty miles out in the wilds back of 
Atchison; had beaten him insensible with a pistol- 
butt ; knocked his wife down with a chair ; and then 
hung his boy, a child of twelve years, tiU, to save 



THE SETTING OUT. 5 

himself from suifocation, he consented to reveal the 
hiding-place of the farmer's funds. Taking these, 
whicli amounted to forty dollars, and all the horses in 
the corral, they had returned to the Missouri, con- 
verted the animals into cash, and, without the least 
attempt at absconding, began to enjoy their gains in 
speculation. Three days from the date of their crime 
they were in the hands of Lynch. 

These facts having been announced to the crowd, 
an opportunity, as they say in other assemblies, was 
given for the brethren to make a few remarks. One 
man on horseback, better dressed and more refined 
in his appearance than the rest, held the attention of 
the crowd with a speech of equal force and freedom 
from temper, in which he drew a sketch of the de- 
fenselessness which would result to the settler if, in 
his lonely cabin, he could not be sure that prompt and 
certain vengeance hung over his would-be assassins. 
The people heard him with a running fire of mur- 
murs, — saying, "Good!" "That's it T" and "I'm 
there too !" when he concluded his little speech with 
a vote for the instant death of both the bushwhack- 
ers. He was followed by others who spoke less ably, but 
all to the same point ; and the crowd finally decided 
that the younger man should be executed at once, 
— the elder have respite till the next day but one 
succeeding. I may be uncharitable to communities of 
incipient civilization, but the respite seemed to me 
granted rather with a view to thrifty economy of 
pleasures than for the sake of pity and completed 
shrift. Indeed, one person told me, " If we hung 'em 
both on Thursday, we shouldn't have anybody to 
hang on Saturday." 

The sentence being determined, its subject was 



6 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

asked by the immediate committee in charge, what he 
had to say for himself. 

" Nothing," he replied, in a tone of nonchalance ; 
" only that you're going to murder a better man than 
any of yourselves." 

He was lifted to the wagon ; surveyed the stony 
faces of the crowd with a quick glance that took in no 
single look of pity ; the rope was adjusted, the wagon 
driven away, and there, a horrid fruit of man's hateful 
passions, he hung, uncovered to all vengeful eyes, and 
the pure, sweet, but unhelping heaven of May, quiver- 
ing from the limb of the cotton-wood. 

This is the wickedness of Lynch executions. Like 
old Tyburn, they rear more gallows-birds than they 
intimidate. The horribly hardening effects of public 
deaths was visible, audible in all the crowd. As the 
poor wretch swung there, now past injuring them, and 
to all noble natures an object of pity, if only for the 
first time, the men cracked their brutal jokes, and 
women laughed at them. Mothers pointed their boys 
to the tree, not as to a warning, but a spectacle. 

" This is not, nor it cannot come to good ! " 

With glutted eyes and unmoved hearts the crowd 
slowly withdrew from their place of fascination ; but, 
as their murmur lessened, the air was broken with 
wails of agony which might have melted a Marat. 
Lying at full length in a wagon outside of the crowd's 
former hem, a young woman, without friend or com- 
forter, was crying aloud for a husband whom she called 
God to witness had been cruelly murdered. 

These things are too horrible to dwell upon. We, 
at the East, are apt to think that the punishment of 
our old national transgressions is all condensed in the 



THE SETTING OUT. 7 

war which has smitten us so sorely. But I felt 
within myself, that day at Atchison, that the bitter 
seed sown by ruffians under the segis of our Federal 
Government never bore fruit more poison to the con- 
stitution of society than such executions as had just 
taken place. It is but little wonder that the contempt 
for law, as the sum of all atrocities under a sanctified 
disguise, which was studiously cultivated among the 
people of Kansas by a past Administration, should 
breed to-day all manner of cruelties, though the pow- 
ers that be have changed. Barbaric habitudes of so- 
ciety cannot be nurtured for years, and then uprooted 
in a week. The arrow has been withdrawn from her 
heart; but "bleeding Kansas " bleeds still. 

I know all the palliations which a young society 
may plead for its excesses ; but I must say that the 
recklessness which met me in the street, at the busi- 
ness places, in my hotel, after the execution, made me 
wonder whether I was on earth or in hell. Women 
in the dress of ladies leaned across the tea-table and 
asked, "Have you been to the hanging ?" with as 
much sang-froid as a New Yorker might say, " Have 
you seen Faust?" Then, between sips of tea and 
bites of biscuit, such as had been, regaled those who 
had not, with particulars that made a stranger sicken 
at his food. 

I was expressing my surprise to an indigenous ac- 
quaintance made that morning, when he replied, 
" Haven't been long in Kansas, have you ? " " Six 
hours," I informed him. " Thought so. Lord bless 
you, nobody thinks anything of being hanged in this 
country ! Why, in one Kansas settlement there lived 
an old man who was too lazy to do anything for his 
living, and whose neighbors had to support him, until 



8 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

finally they got tired of sendin' on him things, and con- 
cluded to put him out of his misery. When he stood 
on the wagon, with the rope around his neck, one new 
settler in the crowd took pity on him, and called out, 
' Hold hard ! ye needn't hang him. I'll give him ten 
bushel o' corn.' ' Is it shelled ? ' drawled the old man 
in his old, lazy voice. ' No, — 'ta'nt,' says the settler. 
' Drive on with your wagon,' says the old man." 

After which veritable history, my new acquaintance 
looked up at the sky, remarked that it was a pity they 
didn't hang both the bushwhackers, " it was such a 
nice day for liangin'," and bid me good-by with regrets 
that I could not stay over io-morrow. 

To turn an Eastern man's notions still more com- 
pletely topsy-turvy on the subject of tribunals and 
government, as we went down to the coach-office to 
arrange for our places overland, we met an agent, 
whom we had expected to transact with, going over 
to Leavenworth between two dragoons, to answer 
before the Brigadier-General of the Department for 
having violated some freight contract on the stage- 
route. I began to wonder whether, if we stayed a lit- 
tle longer in Atchison, we should not see a soldier 
tried for desertion in a justice court, or a church- 
member turned out of the fold for heresy by a 
surrogate. 

The Massasoit House, though far enough from re- 
sembling its ever-memorable namesake in Springfield, 
was still a very creditable hotel for a place on the ex- 
treme borders of civilization ; and we should have slept 
well but for the fact that a party of ranchmen and 
wagon-drivers, who had come into town for holiday, 
saw fit to end their pleasantly stimulating afternoon by 
a night of carouse in a neighboring rum-shop. Fiddles, 



THE SETTING OUT. 9 

that were a fortuitous concourse of wood and catgut, 
without any attempt to systematize them or their 
noise; the sound of heels in the breakdown, loud 
swearing and yells for drink, kept us awake till a late 
hour of our last night on the Missouri River. It 
was not astonishing that, after a series of such unim- 
agined horrors as we had passed through, an Eastern 
lady just arrived should have asked us next morning, 
"whether those were bushwhackers next door." 

The hour of eight saw us embarked upon our ve- 
hicle, with all the baggage which it was absolutely 
necessary to carry : our commissary stores in boxes 
under our feet, where they might be easy of access in 
any of those frequent cases of semi-starvation which 
occur at the stations between the Missouri and the Pa- 
cific. Our guns hung in their cases by the straps of 
the wagon-top ; our blankets were folded under us to 
supplement the cushions. To guard against any emer- 
gency, we were dressed exactly as we should want to 
be, if need occurred to camp out all night. We wore 
broad slouch hats of the softest felt, which made capi- 
tal night-caps for an out-door bed ; blue flannel shirts 
with breast-pockets, the only garment, as far as mate- 
rial goes, which in all weathers or climates is equally 
serviceable, healthful, and comfortable; stout panta- 
loons of gray Cheviot, tucked into knee-boots ; re- 
volvers and cartouche-boxes on belts of broad leather 
about our waists ; and light, loose linen sacks over all. 
I may here anticipate, in order to dismiss the subject, 
by saying that a few hundred miles made some 
changes expedient in our attire. We doffed our sacks, 
and rode in our hunting-shirts ; we took off our belts, 
and slung them with holsters and ammunition beside 
our guns ; and exchanged our boots for loose slip- 



10 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

perSj which are much less galling during a pro- 
tracted wagon-journey, keeping the former close at 
hand for use when we had, as sometimes happened, to 
ease the horses over a hard piece of road by walking 
ourselves. 

The Overland Mail vehicle is of that description 
known as the Concord wagon, — a stout oblong box 
on springs, painted red, with heavy wheels and axles, 
having a flat arched roof of water-proof cloth erected 
on strong posts, like those of a rockaway, and to this 
are attached curtains of the same fabric, which in bad 
weather may be let down and buttoned so tight as to 
make the sides practically as proof against storms as 
the top. In fine weather, when the curtains are up, 
no airier arrangement or more unobstructed view 
could be desired. The seats of the wagon are three, 
the passengers at the end sitting vis-a-vis ; those in 
the middle looking forward, with their backs against 
a strap hooked to the side-posts, as in the old-fashioned 
stage-coach. Six persons can ride comfortably inside, 
if they are only used to sleeping in an upright 
position; but the great pressure of travel to Den- 
ver often at that day compelled passengers to ride 
three on a seat, — an arrangement calculated to give 
one the liveliest ideas of the horrors of a negro hold 
on the middle passage. By the politeness of Messrs. 
Ben Holladay and Center, we were furnished with such 
letters to the Atchison agent of their line as insured 
us a stage to ourselves as far as Denver ; and Mr. Mun- 
ger, the superintendent between Atchison and Fort 
Kearney, did everything in his power to make our 
ride as comfortable as it could be. Just before we set 
out, we became acquainted with a Denver gentleman, 
Mr. Kershaw, and a lady in his charge, who were both 



THE SETTING OUT. 11 

anxious to reach Colorado by the earliest conveyance. 
We accordingly offered them our remaining seats, and 
had no occasion to regret the hospitality, finding them 
most pleasant companions as far as they went with us, 
and becoming afterward indebted to them for many 
courtesies in Colorado. 

Just before we left, Mr. Hunger got word from fur- 
ther west that the buffaloes had started northward for 
their summer resorts, and were now reported upon 
the south bank of the Republican Fork of the Kaw. 
We immediately made up our minds not to lose their 
visit, as we might have no second chance of seeing 
them in their glory, perhaps none of seeing them at 
all, if we went on to Denver without stopping, and 
returned from the Pacific coast — as was then possible, 
and eventually proved actual — by the way of Pan- 
ama or Nicaragua. We accordingly made arrange- 
ments with Mr. Munger to lie by and wait for him 
about one hundred and eighty-five miles west of 
Atchison, at Comstock's Ranche in Nebraska. He, 
meanwhile, would make some final preparations for the 
proposed foray on the Kaw, and meet us at the ranche, 
or overtake us on the road in his light double buggy. 
The good sense of this course was afterward proved 
to our great satisfaction, as we never again saw buffa- 
loes in a state of nature after leaving the Republican 
Fork, passing Fort Kearney, where the main herd 
makes its most frequent transit to the plains north of 
the Platte, some weeks before they crossed the road 
there. 

The Concord wagon rumbled out of Atchison, and 
we were fairly on " The Plains." For a while we were 
accompanied by picket fences ; but these, in despair 
at the idea of limiting immensity, soon gave way to 



12 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

rails, and by the time we reached Lancaster, — a sta- 
tion merely, not a town, — ten miles out of Atchison, 
the rails themselves had succumbed, and we were run- 
ning through an unbroken waste. 

"The Plains" are very different in their character 
from the Prairies. Nowhere, after leaving the Mis- 
souri River westward, does the traveller behold such 
stretches of grass running to the horizon, everywhere 
level like the sea, as he finds in Illinois. The great 
sedimentary deposits which form the prairies proper, 
were laid in a period of long quiet, and denuded of 
their superadjacent water by a slow uniform upheaval, 
or equally slow evaporation, which embraced much 
larger tracts of country than the formative influences 
further west. As might be expected, the land gives 
evidence of more spasmodic and irregular disturbances 
the nearer we approach the great spinal mountain- 
chain of the Continent. 

The grass around us was long and rich. Prairie- 
hens abounded in it, seeming almost as tame as barn- 
yard fowl. They were continually coming to the road 
and running ahead of the horses, so close to us, in- 
deed, that, had we chosen, we might have bagged the 
whole party's supper from the wagon as we rode. 
The common plover were only less plenty, dodging 
about in the grass with their peculiar culprit manner 
as we approached. The mourning dove, a little crea- 
ture of lovely shape and typical color, whose haunts 
embrace the entire Plains region, fluttered or hopped 
constantly about us in pairs. Several varieties of 
hawks, one of which we afterward discovered to be a 
true falcon ; some large ravens, and a species of 
meadow-lark, were the other principal birds which at- 
tracted our attention on this day. 



THE SETTING OUT. 13 

The air was delightfully soft, the sky clear, and the 
road in excellent condition, even without considering 
that Nature and the wheels of travel are here the only 
menders of highway. In some places it was as com- 
pact and smooth as the finest gravel roads of the East. 
Indeed, with the exception of the portion traversing 
the terrible desert of Utah, and a few shorter pieces 
elsewhere, the entire route astonished me by its ex- 
cellence. 

Just after sundown we arrived at Seneca, a settle- 
ment as well as a station, sixty miles from Atchison. 
Here we took tea in quite an ambitious frame tavern, 
and our eyes lay lingeringly on the shingle of Civili- 
zation's last justice of the peace. There was a tin- 
shop in Seneca ; I think a lawyer's office ; and there 
were several dwelling-houses. 

After the darkness came on, and we rolled away 
from Seneca into its darkness, I began to realize that 
we were not going to stop anywhere for the night. It 
was a strange sensation, this ; like being in an arm- 
chair, and sentenced not to get out of it from the 
Missouri to California. 

I do not know whether it is necessary to inform 
anybody that the Overland Mail travelled night and 
day. I had known it always, but I never felt it till 
about twelve o'clock the first night out, when my legs 
began growing unpleasantly long, and my feet swelled 
to such a size that they touched all the boxes and 
musket-butts upon the floor. When these symptoms 
were further accompanied by a dull heat between the 
shoulders, and a longing for something soft applied to 
the nape of the neck, I wondered whether this was 
not what people on shore called wanting to go to bed. 
The facilities for such a gratification were so amus- 



14 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ingly scanty that I con-eluded I must be mistaken. 
The back cushions of the wagon were stuffed as hard 
as cricket-balls, and the seat might have been the flat 
side of a bat. I tried fastening my head in a corner 
by a pocket-handkerchief sling ; but just as uncon- 
sciousness arrived, the head was sure to slip out, and, 
in despair, I finally gave over trying to do anything 
with it. At Guittards', a station famous among such 
passengers as have reached there in proper season for 
delicious suppers, we to-night stopped only long 
enough to change horses, and I took advantage of the 
halt to climb to the box. Here I rode the rest of the 
night, convinced that I could not surrender to Sleep 
until he had made a more protracted siege around the 
outworks. I felt convinced that my friends inside 
would not miss me, they having, some time before, 
reached that stage of sensation in which a stage-floor 
seems piled with human feet. When the fresh team 
started out with a plunge, and the fresh night-breath 
of the Plains began fanning my forehead, the fever of 
unsuccessful sleepiness left me, and I enjoyed myself 
as much as if I were not sure it would return to- 
morrow. 

During the night, near a small settlement called 
Marysville, we forded the Big Blue, one of the largest 
streams in this portion of Kansas — timbered with cot- 
ton-woods, sycamores, oaks, and occasional elms — 
and, a little after sunrise, stopped at " Seventeen Mile 
Point," one hundred and eleven miles from Atchison, 
and the last station this side of Nebraska. 

The stations on the Overland Road, between the 
Missouri and Denver, generally consist of a single 
wooden house, with stables attached, and a large 
corral, or inclosed yard, just adjacent. Some of the 



THE SETTING OUT. 15 

more ambitious station-keepers cultivate several acres 
of land adjoining, in which case the traveller is de- 
lighted by the entrance of fresh vegetables into a bill 
of fare, which is elsewhere unquahfied pork and greasy 
potatoes. Occasionally, too, the station-keeper has 
both time and penchant for hunting ; the happy re- 
sult being buffalo-hump, antelope-steaks, and fricassee 
of prairie-chickens. But the majority of these impor- 
tant personages seem to have retired from the world 
under the influence of an ascetic spirit, and take grim 
delight in visiting the wrongs inflicted upon them by 
the society which they have left, on the innocent way- 
farer compelled to pay for their hospitality. Many of 
them have married copartners in their social grudge ; 
stern females, who boil bad coffee in an affronted man- 
ner, and hand you hot saleratus biscuit with an air of 
personal insult. All their principal supplies are drawn 
from Atchison by the Mail Company's conveyances ; 
and it is no unusual occurrence to lack sugar as well as 
milk in your tea, because "that stage" hasn't brought 
up the last order. The station-keepers charge variously 
from fifty cents in Kansas to a dollar in Nebraska, 
and westward, for every meal, without regard to qual- 
ity. Their charges upon the passengers they collect 
personally (though it is possible to buy meal-tickets 
at Atchison for the whole route) ; the board of the 
drivers is paid by the Company, who keep an account 
with the keepers for them and the stable-tenders. 

"While breakfast was cooking, I loaded a shot-gun, 
and started out for a short excursion in search of 
prairie-hens. Though we had seen numbers of them 
along the road, I was unable to start a single one in 
the grass. This I found to be the ordinary case at 
this hour of the morning and season of the year. 



16 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

They wait till the sun is high and warm before they 
come out to strut and coquet with each other, — be- 
ing the dandies and people of elegant leisure in the 
social system of the Plains. I got back to the station- 
house with the charge in my gun, yet with pleasant 
sensations of willingness to be charged myself, due to 
more than a mile's tramp through the rich grass of 
the breezy divide. 

Just beyond the breakfast-place we entered Ne- 
braska. The country now became wilder and some- 
what more sterile. The signs of human occupation 
disappeared entirely, and with them the prairie-chick- 
ens became less and less abundant. These fowl, as 
may be known, flourish best in the neighborhood of 
settlements, — sometimes, like quail, relying princi- 
pally, over tracts of many miles square, for most of 
their subsistence, upon gleanings from the rick and 
stubble field. When found to any extent in perfectly 
wild regions, they occupy some secret spot far in the 
bosom of the Plains, where their natural food is steady 
and abundant; but they always prefer grain when 
they can get it, and will accompany wagons or stages 
for miles to pick up the droppings. Though the prai- 
rie-fowl diminished, the plovers and doves were still 
abundant. 

At Virginia City, one hundred and thirty miles from 
Atchison, the stage stopped for dinner about noon ; 
but our recollections of a station breakfast were not 
sufficiently fascinating to tempt us into sitting down 
at table. We now had occasion to congratulate our- 
selves on our provision in the matter of commissary 
stores, for, opening one of the boxes under our feet, 
we lunched, alfresco, under lee of the station-barn, on 
pilot-bread, sardines, and canned peaches. Our trav- 



THE SETTING OUT. 17 

elling larder contained, beside many duplicates of 
such a lunch as this, apple-butter, put up by the Shak- 
ers ; preserved green corn and tomatoes ; jars of as- 
sorted pickles, tamarinds, and cans of beef, prepared 
by a process which left nothing but salt and heating 
necessary for the creation of a capital ragout. Before 
these stores were exhausted we had repeated occa- 
sion to thank them for three meals a day, several 
days in succession. Indeed, wherever we stopped 
long enough to do, or get any cooking done, on our 
behalf, we always varied our else carnivorous meal by 
something succulent from the Shakers' tins. 

By this time the whole party were greatly distressed 
from loss of sleep. A more sad-eyed, out-all-nigh tish 
set I never saw anywhere. But all of them except 
myself were just far enough gone in fatigue to take 
cat-naps against their strap or in their corners. My 
head was swollen with fever, but I could not succumb. 
After half an hour's vain attempt at sleeping in a heap, 
I left my room to the others who were in a condition 
to prefer it to the company of the best of friends, and 
once more sought the stage-box, where it was blowing 
a gale of wind that made fever and hats alike difficult 
to hold on to. 

Our driver was a terrible fellow, with all the fin- 
gers missing from one hand, — the most profane man 
and the greatest braggart I ever saw. He alternately 
drank from a black bottle and praised his own 
driving, until the reins dropped out of his remain- 
ing fingers, and he himself would have gone headlong 
from the box, had I not grasped his collar. We had 
just crossed a high bridge without parapets over one 
of the numerous streams in this region, called Big or 
Little " Sandy;" the leaders stopped, and began facing 



18 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the pole, and we were in imminent danger of being 
tipped over or backed down the steep bank. I jumped 
down upon the pole, and caught the reins just in 
time to save us; our Denver friend leaped out with 
his pistol drawn, and induced the driver to descend a 
little quicker than liquor and gravity combined would 
have brought him ; after which, with a word of expla- 
nation directed around the side to our friends within, 
we left the fellow who had nearly murdered us, cur- 
sing his tortuous way along the road, and drove to 
the next station ourselves. In mentioning this occur- 
rence, I should say, as an act of justice to the com- 
pany and its drivers, that it was a very exceptional 
case to see a drunken man on an Overland box. The 
only repetition of it in our whole journey occurred in 
the Rocky Mountains, just beyond Fort Bridger, and 
then without any accident. It is due to the drivers 
as a class to say that they usually astonished me by 
an abstemiousness, under circumstances of great soli- 
tude, monotony, and temptation, which would have 
done credit to any man of business in an Eastern city. 
Many of them, on principle, or from a sense of their 
responsibility, would not drink at all. 

Between Big Sandy and Comstock's we got our first 
experience of a thunder-storm on the Plains. At sun- 
set the clouds were piled into an ebon staircase, draped 
with gold, mounting from the western horizon to the 
zenith ; and as the daylight declined, the massive steps 
became tessellated every now and then with lightning 
working across them silently in strange patterns. The 
weather had been very warm all day, and we thought 
likely that this exhibition would prove nothing more 
than the heat-lightning of our Eastern summer even- 
ings. But about nine o'clock we were undeceived. 



THE SETTING OUT. 19 

The sky "meant business." The agency that wrought 
those delicate traceries of golden sprig and anastomos- 
ing vein-work began to have a voice. At the foot of 
the great stair came a rumbling and a groan, as if the 
giants were beginning to climb. It grew louder, and 
here and there step parted from step, then the struc- 
ture lifted at the base and descended at the top, mak- 
ing a series of black blocks and boulders, hanging 
downward from the same level of sky with lurid 
interstices between them, through which the upward 
depths looked awful. Never ia my life did I see cloud 
distances graded with such delicacy. One could almost 
measure them by miles from the inky surface, hang- 
ing with torn fringes of leaden vapor just above our 
head, up through the tremendous chasms flecked along 
their wall, with dying gold and purple color, with won- 
derful light and shadows, and marked by innumerable 
changes of contour, to the clear but angry sky that 
paved the farthest depth of the abysses. I rode on the 
box for an hour looking into these glorious rifts with 
fascinated eyes. Then between their walls began a 
hurrying interplay of lightning, and the great artillery 
combat of the heavens commenced in earnest. At first 
the adjoining masses had their duels to themselves, — 
battery fighting battery, pair and pair. Half an hour 
more, and the forces had perceptibly massed, — their 
fire coming in broader sheet, their thunder bellowing 
louder. An hour, and the fight of the giants became 
a general engagement. The whole hemisphere was a 
blinding mass of yellow flame at once, and the reports 
were each one instantaneous shock, which burst the 
air like the explosion of a mine. Then the wind rose 
to a hurricane; and before the dust could be set whirl- 
ing by it, there followed such a flood of rain as I 



20 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

never saw anjrwhere, on sea or land. Sitting on the 
box still, for I had much rather be soaked than desert 
such a spectacle, I found my breath taken away for the 
first minute, as if I had been under a waterfall. It 
was not drops, nor jets, nor a sheet ; it was a mass of 
coherent water falling down bodily. Five minutes 
from the time it began to wet us, the horses were run- 
ning fetlock-deep, with the road still hard under their 
hoofs, for the soil had not yet had time to dissolve into 
mud. Torrents were flowing down every incline; 
where the plain basined, the water stood in broad 
sheets revealed by the flashes, like new ponds suddenly 
added to the scenery. Still the storm did not spend 
itself in wind and water. The lightning got broader, 
and its flashes quicker in succession ; the thunder 
surpassed everything I have heard, or read, or dreamed 
of. Between explosions we were so stunned that we 
could scarcely speak to or hear each other, and the 
shocks themselves made us fear for the permanent loss 
of our hearing. One moment we were in utter dark- 
ness, our horses kept in the road only by the sense of 
feeling ; the next, and the vast expanse of rain- tram- 
pled grass lay in one embrace of topaz fire, with the 
colossal piles of clefted cloud out of which the deluge 
was coming, — earth and heaven illumined with a 
brightness surpassing the most cloudless noon. 

Suddenly there appeared before us a portent, of 
which I had read accounts in scientific annals, but 
which I had never seen before and never expect to see 
again. There was a temporary lull in the conflict 
above us. Into the blackness there rose out of the 
ground, apparently from a high divide, not a mile be- 
yond our leaders, a column of lightning sized and 
shaped like the trunk of a tall pine. Straight and 



THE SETTING OUT. 21 

swift, but with a more measurely motion than that of 
the higher discharges, it shot up, shedding its glare 
for many rods around, and making a sharply cut band 
x)f fire against the black background of the clouds, 
until it struck the nearest mass of vapor. Then, with 
the most tremendous flash and peal of the whole 
storm, its blazing capital broke into splinters, and went 
shivering across the area, right over our heads. If it 
were only possible to paint such things ! But on can- 
vas they would seem even more theatrical than they 
do in these inadequate words. In all the wrath of 
nature, — mad hurricanes and thunder-storms, on sea 
or land, — there never visited me anything to com- 
pare in awful splendor, and the impression of ungov- 
erned power, with this upward lightning-stroke on the 
Nebraska Plains. 

Out of the deluge, the flame, and the roar, we sud- 
denly saw a corral and log-house, at our right-hand ; 
a small stream, swollen to a torrent, under tall cotton- 
woods, upon our left. The former were " Comstock's ; " 
the latter was the Little Blue. Drenched to the 
skin, but happy with the memory of the greatest night 
in my life, I jumped down, and passed one of the box- 
lanterns inside to be lighted, for the first time, by my 
comparatively dry companions. This effected, we 
opened the curtains sufficiently to let them escape ; 
with the assistance of the driver, got out of the boat 
all such dunnage as we intended to stop with us ; and 
by the time everything was disgorged but our guns, 
succeeded in awakening the occupants of the ranche 
to a sense of our needs. Comstock came to the door 
with a lantern of his own, and as soon as we pro- 
nounced the words "Hunger" and "buffalo hunt," 
welcomed us with a cordiality as cheering as dry 



22 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

stockings. A moment more, and all our belongings 
were whisked out of the torrent into a long apart- 
ment, floored with hewn plank and nicely weather- 
tight ; the whip cracked on the off leader's withers ; 
and saying good-night to our late comrades, with an 
accompaniment of thunder, we saw them whirl away 
into the glare, and shut the ranche door between us 
and the storm. 

A tall ladder led up from the kitchen, reception- 
room, and bed-chamber we had just entered, into the 
"men folks' " loft, above. Ascending it, under Com- 
stock's guidance, we found a number of sturdy ranche- 
men snoring defiance to the outer storm, and without 
ceremony dropped down in our blankets on the inter- 
vals of floor between them. As we have seen, it can 
thunder in Nebraska, — but not loud enough to break 
such slumber as then and there fell incontinently 
upon our prostrate forms! 



CHAPTER II. 

COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 

CoMSTOCK had the early habits, without the aggres- 
sive and proselyting spirit, of most pioneers. He pit- 
ied our Eastern weakness, and let us sleep late, which, 
in Nebraska, means the sybaritic hour of eight a. m. 
It was still raining when we arose ; but it was only 
a trickle compared with the night before. A Euphu- 
ist, indefatigable in hunting metaphors to earth, might 
have said that the sky looked like a battle-field the 
day after an engagement, where the exhausted clouds 
lay still, mangled with lightning, and bleeding lymph 
from all their wounds down upon the world below. 
Or he might have compared it to a great ball-room, 
where the dancers had waltzed themselves to death 
to the music of the thunder-band, and were now 
strewn prostrate on the floor of their late revel, amid 
the drippings of ruptured goblet, flask, and wassail 
bowl. To the matter-of-fact person, it was simply 
raining, and after a style which promised steady con- 
tinuance all day; but whether the "tireless heavens" 
looked fagged to him or not, he must have acknowl- 
edged that he felt so, had he been of our party. We 
had not yet reacquired the old muscular tone of for- 
mer forest- camps, which makes sleep, on a log-floor 
and a blanket, as refreshing as on the springiest mat- 
tress. We were a little lame, and, though we said 
nothing about it, were unable to regard eight a. m., 



24 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

an hour so luxuriously late as it appeared to our 
sturdy host, our last late breakfast having been 
eaten, like others of the series, at half-past eleven in 
New York. Yet we were undeniably refreshed from 
the sore, wide-awake sleepiness of the day before ; 
and a capital meal of stewed buffalo-hump and ante- 
lope-steak, washed down by coffee, surprisingly realis- 
tic for this latitude of pease and chickory ideals, 
creamed, moreover, from the sumptuous and unmis- 
takable udders of nature, proved palatable to us in 
the highest degree. 

I like so much to think of the Comstocks — one of 
the best, truest, kindest families of pioneer people we 
met in our whole journey, and having no equals for 
typical character or native goodness in our experience, 
short of Sisson's delightful ranche at the foot of Shasta 
Peak, in California, — I enjoy their memory so heart- 
ily, that I am fain to spend a portion of this rainy 
Nebraska day in making their portraits for my 
readers. 

Comstock himself is a man about sixty-three, with 
a head and face like the pictures of De Quincey. In 
contour only, not in expression ; for in the wrinkles 
around his eyes lurks a Yankee waggery, which no 
English face, even the shrewdest, ever simulates. His 
hair is grizzled and wiry, such as belongs to the iron 
temperament. He is of the medium height, com- 
pactly made, and in every limb and lineament shows 
the training of over half a century's pioneer hfe, 
hardship having braced instead of shaken him. He 
began his history in the western part of New York 
State, when bear-hunts were still an accessible pastime 
to people in the vicinity of Rochester, and all the now 
smiling lawns and meadow-lands of the region were 



COMSTOCK'S.-A BUFFALO HUNT. 25 

howling wildernesses, here and there intersected by a 
bridle-path. From his earliest manhood he has been 
pressing the front of barbarism. He has lived succes- 
sively in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas, and 
Nebraska. As fast as civilization has come up to his 
stake set in the wilderness, he has pulled it up, and 
travelled to some newer domain, beyond the atmos- 
phere of artificial society. There is that in him which 
cannot tolerate fine gentlemen, town-meetings, polit- 
ical claptrap, and the gossip of mixed communities. 
As his eldest son said of himself, so he might say, 
" I cannot breathe free in sight of fences : I must be 
able to ride my horse where I like." Yet, for all this, 
there is nothing about him of the barbarism he has 
been fighting ; nothing of asceticism or misanthropy 
toward the society he has left behind. He is a de- 
vouring reader. The crannies of his log-house are 
full of old magazines — newspapers of ancient date — 
well-read and re-read books. He takes the liveliest 
interest in everything that concerns the East ; he is 
thoroughly acquainted with the names that have 
figured most largely in our public records, and has a 
general knowledge of recent literature which sur- 
prised me. He was never tired of hearing about New 
York, Boston, Philadelphia, their prominent people 
and institutions. I think he felt the same kind of 
interest in them that a boy feels in the Island of 
San Juan de Fernandez. An ideal blessedness sur- 
rounds Robinson Crusoe, to our youthful fancy, al- 
though on stern logical considerations, we should not 
care to be cast upon an uninhabited island ourselves. 
Nothing would tempt Comstock to live in a great 
city ; yet its diminished roar, heard far off on the rear 
of the buffaloes, fascinates him hke weird music. He 



26 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

was driven out of Texas by the corrupt manners of 
the slavocracy around him, and he loves Freedom as 
he loves air. He never tires of talking about people 
who have helped her at the East. " I would go fur- 
ther," said he one day, "to take a look at Henry 
Ward Beecher, than to see the biggest old buffalo-bull 
that ever ran." 

Comstock is a widower, with a large family of chil- 
dren, most of them living with him, and two of them 
having children of their own under his roof On the 
Plains there is none of our Eastern necessity of leav- 
ing home to push one's fortune. There is plenty of 
pushing to be done in home's immediate neighbor- 
hood, — plenty of room to push, where a family is 
surrounded everywhere by league on league of the 
most fertile soil, which has never been appropriated, 
recorded, or even surveyed for the market. The Lit- 
tle Blue is fringed with cotton- wood of lofty growth : 
men and axes are the only remaining conditions 
for a house and a corral. To be sure, cotton-wood 
timber has one unpleasant idiosyncrasy : even while 
it is growing, all the crevices of its bark swarm with 
that wretched insect which has received its name from 
the slovenly beds of corrupt civilization, and con- 
ferred on them their main horror ; but a good sea- 
soning removes the pest, and I must say for Com- 
stock's that I never found an individual of the species 
while I stayed there. As for grain-land and pasture- 
lot, the only problem with the family is the point of 
the compass towards which they shall run the plough 
or drive the cattle; the consideration of how far 
never once intrudes upon their minds. The absence 
of fences makes it necessary to keep a tolerable stud 
of horses for the chase of stray steers. Occasionally 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 27 

a herd of emigrant cattle goes past, along the Over- 
land trail, and not altogether unbeknown to its driv- 
ers, who are never celebrated for clear notions on 
portable property, absorbs a nice yoke of Comstock's 
animals, who chance to be feeding by the wayside. 
These have to be followed up and reclaimed, — a mat- 
ter which may cost a day's rough riding, but noth- 
ing in the shape of litigation, where there are no 
courts or lawyers, and little in the nature of alterca- 
tion, where everybody has so many cattle that two, 
more or less, are not worth a squabble. This is the 
main anxiety affecting the Comstock mind. It is 
quite unbothered with cumbersome and costly prep- 
arations for the wintering of stock. It needs and 
builds no barns or stables. The climate is at no sea- 
son so severe that animals require more than the 
shelter of a corral or an open shed. All over this 
region the luxuriant grass cures on the ground, 
and makes inexhaustible winter feed, without the 
trouble of mowing and stacking. The snows never 
last long enough to starve out the herds left running 
at large. They sleep, as well as graze, on the open 
plain, all the year round, never being driven in, save 
to yoke, brand, or milk them. These facts make the 
pastoral life almost Arcadian, as far as labor is con- 
cerned. When a pioneer, like Comstock, has secured 
a few fine breeding animals, he is in possession of the 
easiest managed and most rapidly increasing capital 
in the world. 

Beside his herds, Comstock attends to farming, in a 
moderate way, — raising sufficient corn for his horses' 
use, when work takes them out of pasture, and grain 
enough to keep his family supplied with flour. He 
has a vegetable patch, just across the Little Blue from 



28 THE HEART OF THE CONTmENT. 

his corral, whose deep, rich loam and thrifty crops 
would delight the heart of any suburban market 
gardener. 

The necessities of life press a man so little in this 
bounteous region, that a comparatively small propor- 
tion of any day is devoted by the Comstocks to actual 
labor. Comstock himself is as sturdy at sixty-three 
as he was at forty, and goes out to the patch, across 
his log bridge, with a hoe over his shoulder, stepping 
as elastically as if he had pastime before him. His 
boys go with him ; and after a forenoon of steady work, 
all come in to dinner, and seldom return again to any 
heavier labor than breaking colts, hunting, or chasing 
estrays. Within an hour's ride, across the Blue, ante- 
lope are nearly as plenty as anywhere on the Plains ; 
and one afternoon's good sport will replenish the 
Comstock larders with the best fresh meat known to 
wild or civilized bills of fare. 

George Comstock, the eldest son of the old pioneer, 
lives with him in a partition of the ranch -house, — 
whose front is devoted to miscellaneous emigrant sup- 
plies, while its rear is the sitting-room of a thrifty Mrs. 
George and the nursery of a rising family. In all the 
delightful old genre pieces of the Dutch artists, and 
the eccentric old places in Wapping and Holborn 
which the character-novelists of London love to paint, 
there is nothing more original than the sight of that 
shop and dwelling-room combined : where slouching 
teamsters take their pull at the beer-mug or Jamaica 
bottle, on their way to California, across a counter 
where the family bread-batch rests in transitu to the 
oven ; where a pile of hickory shirts lies for sale on a 
shelf beside the family tea-kettle ; where the cradle and 
the cooking-stove are inextricably mixed with vinegar 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 29 

barrels and meal-sacks ; where the babies play Hide- 
and-seek behind piles of wagon canvas, and the house- 
wife's work-basket is flanked by rows of Osgood's 
Cholagogue. In this omnium gatherum of commerce 
and the family I found most unsuspectable things : 
copies of the " New York Herald," fresh with all the 
bloom of last month; a luxury of advanced civilization 
known as ready-prepared egg-nog; a sewing-machine; 
all kinds of canned fruit from the Shaker settlements ; 
Sunday suits of great gloss, with a certain tenuity in 
the legs and arms, the very thing for a rotund, muscu- 
lar lover, fearless of exhibiting his outlines ; bandanna 
handkerchiefs shaming the flamingo ; plug-tobacco in 
great swarthy cubes; trace-chains, ox-yokes, frying- 
pans. Little Songsters, beaver-skins taken in barter, 
looking-glasses, felt hats, ticking clocks, — but let me 
not attempt the inventory of a collection which sur- 
prised me as much out on the rim of the buffalo herds 
as it would have surprised Crusoe to have been washed 
ashore from the wreck into the front door of a branch 
of A. T. Stewart's. The shop is a house of call to all 
the emigrants and drivers on their way westward, and 
adds not a little to the revenue of the Comstocks, who 
deserve everything they can make, since people fairer 
and less huckstering in their nature exist nowhere. 

To return to the other side of the house. The me- 
nage of Comstock, Senior, is in charge of his two daugh- 
ters, Frank and Mary, who for skillful housewifery, 
sterling common sense, and native refinement, are sur- 
passed by few women whom I ever met at the East. 
It was a perpetual surprise to me to hear girls whose 
whole life had been spent on the Plains or in the back- 
woods, talk of Longfellow and Bryant, Dickens and 
Thackeray, Scott and Cooper, when they came in from 



30 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

milking, and sat down in their plain calicoes to knit the 
masculine stockings or mend the infantile pinafores. 
Nobody could talk more understandingly, criticise 
more justly, or appreciate more fully everything in 
their authors that related to natural feeling ; and if 
this book ever gets out to them (as I mean it shall), I 
shall be more interested in knowing their opinion of it 
than that of most critics who shall overhaul me in 
the cities. It is the pride of our American system 
that such womanly culture can coexist in the Nebraska 
wilds with those sturdy administrative qualities which 
subdue savagery into a home, and fight the battle 
for a civilization which shall presently come and build 
cities on their conquered field. Place on the frontiers 
of any other country in the world a family of women 
isolated from all the luxuries and softening influences 
proper to their sex, and after a few years have gone 
over their heads you will find a set of female boors 
living in a slovenly hut. But <'the peasantry" have 
no status in America. The nearest approach to them 
which we found in all our journeying was here and 
there a houseful of unfortunate "Pikes" or "Butter- 
nuts," whom slavery had degraded below the black 
level before they escaped from its miasma, and the first 
generation of whom still lay entangled in the accursed 
traditions of an accursed system, while the second 
and third were gradually struggling out into the light 
of new ideas. But even here there was a dim sense 
of something better to be had for the trying which 
does not exist among the disheartened lower strata of 
social Europe. As for the Comstocks, they were truly 
typical American people. They understood the sci- 
ence of pioneering as a chemist understands analysis 
and reactions ; but just as one of our chemists would 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. Bl 

bestir himself, and make his way up in the world, if 
ill-fortune drove him to the gold-diggings, so would 
they within three years' time adapt themselves to any 
social conditions into which fate might force them, and 
lay the foundations of a family whose position would 
be prominent in any town where it might live. I was 
hourly surprised to see the self-reliance of these sisters. 
They were sometimes left alone in the ranche for 
a day at a time, all the " men-folks " being off on a 
hunt or elsewhere out of call. On several such occa- 
sions a detachment from one of the numerous Indian 
bands who make this region by turns a neutral and a 
fighting ground, poured in to make the " lone women " 
a compulsory visit. Now, an Indian visit is no joke. 
Even where a tribe pretends to be friendly, its only 
distinction between that and the hostile bearing is, 
that instead of scalping you first and robbing you 
afterward, it takes all the property it can lay hands 
on, and leaves your hair for a more convenient season. 
A band of " friendly " Sioux comes to a small settle- 
ment, stops at the first house, emaciates itself by 
drawing in the cheeks and abdomen, denotes by sepul- 
chral grunts and distressed gestures that it has had 
nothing to eat for " three shneep " (whereby three 
sleeps, or entire days and nights, are intended), seizes 
on everything edible and, if the white feather is shown 
it, everything portable which it can appreciate beside ; 
confiscates guns, ammunition, and whiskey, and, hav- 
ing cleared out house number one, goes in succession 
to every other dwelling with the same emaciation, 
gesture, and appropriation, until it departs at the other 
end of the settlement stuffed beyond the elasticity of 
all conceivable animals save Indians and anacondas, 
and loaded with the materials for a month's barter 



32 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

and a fortnight's " drunk." I asked Mary Comstock if 
she was not afraid of such visitors. "0 no ! " she 
replied ; " we always get the guns out of sight when 
we are left alone by the men-folks, so that if the In- 
dians come we needn't be robbed of what must defend 
us on a pinch ; and if we see them coming, we bolt the 
doors, and talk with them through the shut window. 
Sometimes they steal a march on us, and the first thing 
we know they're swarming in like bees, — asking for 
everything they see, hunting for something to eat, 
and begging to be "treated." We generally give 'em 
everything they want to eat, but when it comes to 
liquor, — not we ! One young Indian last summer got 
mighty sassy when his band came here, and insisted 
on having something to drink. At last I got a bottle 
of Perry Davis's Pain-killer, and handed him that. 
He just threw his head back, and took it down at one 
swallow. The next thing he gave such a yell, bolted 
through the door, and after that he never troubled 
me much." 

Comstock has two sons with him beside George, both 
excellent specimens of the young pioneer, — one about 
twenty, the other about sixteen years old. They are 
fine shots, fearless horsemen, industrious farmers and 
herdsmen, — with the same rich veins of original hu- 
mor and strong common sense which run through all 
the other members of the family. Their manners are 
frank, self-respectful, and, in the highest sense of the 
word, gentlemanly. There is a cordial kindness and a 
native refinement in all they do or say, as far from the 
artificial politeness or elegant puppyism which we too 
often find in our city boys at the East, as from the 
rustic greenness and awkwardness with which the 
traditions of romance and the stage invest the young 
backwoodsman. 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 33 

Beside these children of Comstock's and others of 
the third generation, the log-cabin shelters a number 
of ranch -men and hunters, who assist in caring for the 
crops and herds, and purveying for the family with 
their rifles. A young Philadelphian, William Butler, 
who built the ranch as an emigrant trading-post, sell- 
ing it to Comstock on the death of his brother and 
partner, lives here when he is not in the saddle or in 
camp. Willard Head, a dashing horseman, rejoicing in 
gorgeous leather breeches of Mexican manufacture, 
adorned with shiny bell-buttons all the way up the 
leg, makes this his rendezvous while awaiting promo- 
tion to the box of an Overland stage. Last, but as 
characteristic a pioneer as any of the family, comes 
John Gilbert, — a weather-bronzed youth of twenty- 
five, with the most resplendent set of teeth, blue eyes 
full of uncontrollable waggery, and a pair of hands 
skilled in every department of frontier craft, from 
throwing a lariat to building a house. His sight is as 
keen as an Indian's. This by itself makes him a capi- 
tal shot, and, combined with quick intuitions and gre^t 
experience, a guide unsurpassed by any I ever saw. 
Crowning his excellent physical qualities are a dry 
wit and inexhaustible backwoods' humor which would 
keep a camp cheerful if reduced to mule-meat and 
wild onions. 

The second day after our arrival at Comstock's 
proved as fair and sunny as we could desire. Every- 
thing had been prepared for our expedition to the 
buffalo country. A sack of flour, a small keg of salt 
pork, a box of hard-tack, a gridiron, two frying-pans, 
some camp-kettles, a pile of tin plates, and a lot of 
knives and forks ; a judicious selection from our own 
party's private stores, consisting of pickles, canned 



34 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

fruits, condensed milk and cofTee, — all these, and 
numerous small boxes containing the condiments for 
a reinforcement of nature's hunger-sauce, stood in a 
pile that looked like moving-day, at the door of the 
ranche by seven o'clock in the morning. Hunger of 
the Overland Road had reached us with his double 
buggy and two fast horses on the evening before. Af- 
ter breakfast we immediately set out in the following 
order. The artist of the expedition. Hunger, and my- 
self, with a pair of rifles, a shot-gun, and the large 
color-box which accompanied our entire journey, occu- 
pied the buggy. Butler, George and Ansell Comstock, 
John Gilbert, and the two remaining gentlemen of our 
party went in a couple of large farm-wagons drawn by 
teams belonging to the ranch. Willard Head, and 
Thompson of the Overland station to the eastward 
of us, which bore his name, escorted us as skirmishers, 
each on his own horse. 

We forded the Little Blue just across the road from 
the ranch, passed the thrifty vegetable patch which 
supplied the Comstock table, and at once struck south 
over the trackless plain. The grass was tall and lux- 
uriant, but not so close as to impede our animals. In 
spite of the recent rain-storm, the ground, matted with 
grass-roots, bore our hoofs and wheels as firmly as a 
trotting-course. Everybody was in high spirits. To 
men just out of the hot-house of New York life, the air 
and sunshine were fairly intoxicating. Life swarmed 
around us more luxuriously at every step. The wild 
flowers of the Plains were a perpetual source of hap- 
piness to the eye. They made royal splashes of high 
color on the sunny sides of all the divides; they 
checkered the rich green of the ravines with delicious 
contrasts ; and every now and then, as the grass waved, 



I 
COMSTOCK'S. - A BUFFALO HUNT. 35 

glowed upon us out of their secret nurseries among 
the tall blades, like tangled sunshine getting woven 
through the herbage by the shuttle of the wind. Be- 
fore we left home I had deeply regretted our failure 
to include a practical botanist in our party ; I regretted 
it still more when we were among the lavish Flora 
of the Plains ; and most of all, having to describe so 
inadequately what might have been treated so well, 
do I regret it now. But this makes no pretense 
to be a purely scientific book, and 1 must not omit 
to rehearse the beauties which rejoice the tourist, be- 
cause I cannot say how they would strike the botanist. 

Over all the higher lands of the rolling plain which 
we were traversing abounded a pink, purple, crimson, 
or sometimes nearly white blossom, known here as the 
Indian pea. It grows on a long, villous flower-stalk, 
around which both blossoms and leaves are symmet- 
rically arranged ; its pistil is carried in a sheath, with 
the stamens about its base, and its fruit is a pod in 
shape like a large flattened gooseberry, containing 
seeds of the size of a pin-head. This pod is edible 
when boiled in salt water; at least, it is eaten, though 
to an Eastern epicure its taste is undisguisably rank. 
The Indian pea at this season, when in full blossom, 
both from its profusion and the variety of its tints, is 
one of the most important contributions to the beauty 
of the Plains. 

Prairie roses are abundant everywhere on this por- 
tion of the Plains. I found the yellow, white, and pink 
varieties, all of which are luxuriant in blossom and 
deliciously fragrant. The tiny blue star-grass lurks 
everywhere among the taller herbage ; and in many 
places I saw a variety of sorrel ( Oxalis acetocella ) 
bearing yellow blossoms as large as a good-sized but- 



36 THE HEAKT OF THE CONTINENT. 

tercup, though in every other respect it appears quite 
identical with our Eastern plant. Along the borders 
of the small streams, especially where the ground was 
shaded, grew a small variety of our evening primrose, 
of several tints, from pale straw-color to nearly orange ; 
and in low, moist spots I noticed several specimens of 
a flower only differing from this in the possession of 
black spots and a carinated structure dividing the 
corolla into segments, upon the middle of each of the 
petals. Another plant, which seemed to me a species 
of the abutilon, had handsome cupellate blossoms of a 
deep-orange color, striated longitudinally along the 
petals with delicate pale yellow. Here and there grew 
a white species closely allied to our garden " rocket;" 
and a wild sunflower, with a root which I found quite 
as edible and as flavorous as our Jerusalem artichoke, 
was very common on all the slopes of the divides. 

But the two most charming flowers of the region, 
the one for its perfume, the other for its color, were a 
tiny species having the habits and appearance of the 
water-lily, to whose family I supposed it to belong, and 
a crimson cup as large as a small althea, whose only 
name among the ranche people was " the ground 
popp3%" though whether it be really allied to that 
plant I regret my inability to state. Its plant-leaves 
are multilobed, and somewhat like those of our own 
poppy ; but it grows upon running stalks close to the 
ground, and to unscientific eyes seems quite as closely 
connected with the mallows. It appears in patches 
varying from a few feet to several rods in circuit, and 
wherever these occur, the ground is one gorgeous 
mass of magenta fire. It is the glory of the fertile 
plains in May and early June, and we afterward 
found it extending for miles among the barren sand- 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 37 

dunes beyond Fort Kearney, encroaching upon the ter- 
ritory of the cacti and the gramma-grass. Wherever 
it appears, it is the chief visual delight of the Plains, 
Flora. The tiny water-lily above mentioned, I only 
found once in all our progress to the buffalo country. 
We had halted at the bottom of a wet-draw to water 
our horses. I went above the place where they were 
drinking, to quench my thirst at a brown pool which 
appeared a trifle less stagnant than their watering- 
place, and, lying down with my face over the water, 
noticed an exquisitely subtle fragrance like that of 
tuberose and orange-flower combined. On pushing 
away the weeds which grew out over the pool, I found 
a nest of lovely white blossoms, smaller than the small- 
est strawberry-flower, shaped like an Eastern water- 
lily in miniature, with delicate yellow stamens and 
pistil, and moored on the water by slender green fila- 
ments rooted in the ooze of the pool. No American 
blossom that I am acquainted with, not even the trail- 
ing arbutus, possesses such an indescribable ethereal 
fragrance as this tiny water-lily. I sought in vain to 
preserve specimens of it. The pages of the note-book 
in which I pressed them, absorbed the petals as if they 
had been dew, and only stains were left, having none 
of the flower's characteristic odor. 

We had been travelling less than an hour, and had 
crossed a wet ravine, called " White Ash Draw," be- 
tween our original divide and the next further south, 
when we saw our first antelope. He was a mere glanc- 
ing spot on the sunny side of a slope two miles off, and 
disappeared too soon to be resolved by the field-glass. 
From that time forward we were continually uncov- 
ering pairs or groups of these lovely creatures, and 
before noon got near enough to some of them for 



38 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

a shot. Butler's rifle brought down a fine young buck. 
We laid him in one of the wagons, and continued our 
march. 

It is perhaps no exaggeration to call the antelope 
the most beautiful as well as the swiftest animal 
of our American wilds. His size is that of a young 
red-deei; doe; his color a compromise between buff 
and fawn, shading here and there into reddish-brown, 
with a patch of pure white on the buttocks which 
gives rise to the Western term expressive of his stam- 
pede, " showing his clean linen." His ears grow far 
back on his head, are long, and curve so much that at 
a distance they appear like horns. The horns them- 
selves grow so immediately over the supra-orbital pro- 
jection as to seem coming out of the animal's eyes ; 
they are long, slender, have a comparatively slight 
retro-curve, and show no sign of branching, save a lit- 
tle bud which is developed, as in the engraving, near 
the root, when the antelope is about two years old. 
The older bucks are occasionally found with other 
rudiments of this kind. 

The chief peculiarity of the antelope is his lack of 
a " a dew-claw." His feet have no rudimentary hoof 
like the deer's. He is almost or quite an anomaly in 
this respect among the tribes with which he is al- 
lied. Whatever that deficiency may amount to, it 
certainly does not interfere with his speed, which is 
almost incredible, even to an eye-witness. We could 
scarcely believe that our sight had not deceived us, 
when, at one moment, we saw one of these little 
creatures plainly with the naked eye, browsing on a 
slope fifty yards off, the next beheld him dwindling 
to a mere speck, and the next lost sight of him alto- 
gether. His flight was more like that of a bird than 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 39 

a quadruped, sometimes rather like a rocket than 
either. Occasionally we surprised a pair of antelopes 
on a wide area of even ground, where we could watch 
their stampede for a longer period without obstruction ; 
and the study of their motion became a perfect de- 
light to the eye. They seldom or never leapt like 
deer, but ran with level backs, and in smooth rhythm, 
like sheep, — their legs glancing faster than sight 
could follow. We got no expression for this peculiar 
gait till George Comstock, looking at a flock of them 
in full flight, ejaculated, idiomatically, " Lord ! dont 
they open and shet lively ! " 

It was quite amusing to see them baffle the attempts 
of one of our mounted men, whose enthusiasm over- 
came his experience. Clapping spurs to his horse, he 
rode with all his might at a flock of them, feeding 
within long rifle-shot, and came about eighty yards 
from them before they snuffed him and turned tail. 
For nearly ten minutes they treated him as a butter- 
fly treats a school-boy. Putting half a mile between 
them and his panting horse in as little time as it takes 
to write it, they paused, stood with their noses in air, 
and seemed to be having a quiet laugh among them- 
selves ; let him approach nearly as close as before, 
and then floated away, on a line at right angles to 
their former retreat, tempting him with the delusion 
that he might head them off! As often as he turned, 
they repeated these tactics, until at last he stopped, 
quite provoked at himself, and with his horse thor- 
oughly winded, to see their " clean linen " flash for an 
instant in the sun, as they went out of sight among 
some thick cotton-woods, on the edge of a distant run. 
It was about as hopeful a piece of business as trying 
to run down a telegraph message. 



40 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Later in the day, we learned the only way to hunt 
antelope with unvarying success. It is an old Indian 
method, and the white men on the Plains have 
learned as much adroitness in it as their exemplars. 
The antelope is not afraid of horses ; and by walking 
in the cover of his saddle-animal, the hunter can get 
quite near a flock without being discovered, provided 
he approaches against the wind. If the wind blows 
from him, it is astonishing how quickly their scent 
warns them of him, without the least aid from their 
eyes. Having got as near them as he dares in this 
way, he throws the coil of his lariat down from the 
saddle-horn, crouches and pickets his horse with a 
sharp stake, always carried with him for the purpose. 
Lying in the grass, he ties his bright colored bandanna 
(a strip of white cloth will answer, faute de mieiix) 
to a tall sunflower stalk, his ramrod, or a stick of any 
kind. If still too far off to attract his game, he crawls 
low on his hands and knees, dragging his rifle by his 
side, until he reaches a spot of such prominence that 
they would be sure to see him in an instant if he 
stood up. There he quietly lies down again on his 
stomach, and lifts his extemporized flag as high as 
he can reach. The antelopes see it, stop browsing, 
raise their heads, and peer forward with bulging 
eyes, but show no signs of fright. The flag is for a 
moment dropped out of sight into the grass. The 
beautiful creatures lower their noses, and attempt to 
resume their dinner. But there is something on their 
minds. After one or two distrait pulls at the sweet 
grass-roots, their heads are again lifted, and again 
they peer earnestly forward. Up goes the flag 
once more, and this time perhaps with a slow wav- 
ing motion. The antelopes' curiosity is now thor- 




ANTKLOPES. See page 



*-£ < 




I'aAIlUK DO^S. Sec page 40. 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 41 

oughly excited. For an instant they pause irreso- 
lutely, then make two or three hesitating steps in ad- 
vance, snuffing as they go. Again the flag is lowered. 
They turn to each other, and seem to be holding a 
parley. Their inevitable conclusion is that they will 
pursue their reconnoissance, and see what strange bird 
that is fluttering above the grass. When the flag is 
once more lifted, they advance again, and finally, un- 
less the wind shifts, or the recumbent hunter finds his 
patience ebbing, come up almost within pistol-shot of 
his ambush. Crack goes his rifle ; and he must be a 
poor shot indeed if one of the beautiful quarries before 
him does not turn a summerset and tumble head- 
long. I have known a single rifle-ball do the business 
for two antelopes, where they stood in range. If now 
the hunter does not discover himself, one at least of 
the remaining antelopes is often easily bagged. The 
survivors dart away for a moment from the side of 
their fallen comrade, but do not go far, often return, 
and nearly always stand still, to satisfy their own cu- 
riosity, within easy rifle-shot of the hunter. But un- 
less he actually needs the meat at once, or can avail 
himself of it before it spoils, the thorough-going hun- 
ter of the Plains is too chivalrous and merciful (to 
say nothing of economy, in a country where game is as 
plenty as at creation) to slaughter a beautiful animal 
for which, despite his own rough exterior, he has a 
true, even poetical, admiration. I never found a hun- 
ter on the Plains (I am not including boy- tourists and 
foreign emigrants) who would not blush to emulate 
Gordon Cummings. 

About six miles south of the spot where we en- 
countered our first antelope, we saw our first buffa- 
loes. John Gilbert, the wariest hunter of the whole 



42 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

party, rode alongside of our buggy, and quietly 
pointed to eight or ten scattered black dots on a 
divide, nearly three miles away, to our right. Our 
glasses revealed their character ; and I should be al- 
most ashamed to let an old hunter know what a fever 
of enthusiasm that far-off glance communicated to 
my blood. It was such a strange jumble of feeling to 
remember operas. National Academy pictures, and the 
crowd on Broadway, so close on the heels of these 
grand old giants, who own the monarchy of the Con- 
tinent's freest wilderness. I felt as happy as a green 
boy, and trembled all over. Buffaloes — indubitable 
buffaloes — feeding on that vast, sunny, fenceless 
mead, in as matter-of-fact and bovine a manner as 
any New England farmer's cows on one of Coleman's 
or Shattuck's elm-dotted pasture-lots. They were too 
far away to take any notice of us, and proved to be 
only the outposts of the herd, — the extreme advance 
of venerable bulls, pushed across the Republican to 
reconnoitre. 

Just after we saw the buffaloes, I had a remarkable 
instance of John Gilbert's delicate Indian training as 
a guide. We had been steering all the morning, 
since we left the Blue, by the points of compass, but 
following the main divides for the sake of a good 
track as closely as we could without inconvenient ab- 
erration from the ford on the Republican, for which 
we had been making. The ground now began rising 
before us, and we came to a place where the divide 
forked. We had not yet seen the Republican, nor the 
timber which marked its first bottom. It became 
a question to us which way we should turn, east or 
west, as nothing more entirely without landmarks 
than the Plains out of sight of timber can well be 
imagined. 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 43 

John Gilbert was called upon to decide, while the 
party halted. He rode about in the tall grass for a 
few moments without any particular appearance of 
scrutiny, and finally remarked, — 

"We'll keep to the eastward, I reckon. Some fel- 
low 's gone wrong hereabouts lately. I wonder who 
it could be. Hunger, when you were coming along 
the road, did you pass a big covered wagon and a 
small ambulance, — a four-mule team hitched to one, 
and a span o' horses on t'other?" 

Hunger hadn't, but Thompson had seen such an 
" outfit " camped near his station the day before. 

" Well, that's it : it's come on down and turned off 
in the wrong d'rection, just hereabouts." 

" }Vhafs IT?" asked the . uninitiated, "and tvhere is 
it ? There's nothing to be seen of that kind." 

"0 yes, there is," replied John, positively. "I've 
just found the tracks. Here's one set o' narrow wheels, 
with eight big hoof-marks between 'em ; and a sorter 
mixed up with that is a set of broad wheels, with six- 
teen small hoofs in between them, a comin' after one 
another. One 's the ambulance and horses. T'other 's 
the wagon and the mules. Then, just a little divided 
from them, and turnin' easterly, is the old track our 
wagon made when we come down a shootin' from the 
ranche, ten days ago. So easterly 's our way ; and 
the other fellows '11 get lost, I reckon." 

To satisfy my curiosity, I jumped down from the 
buggy, pushed the high grass away, and among its 
matted roots discovered something like the marks he 
described. From the height where he sat on horse- 
back, they were as invisible to any ordinary eye as 
if they had been at the bottom of the sea ; and when 
I did discover them, they would have been as illegible 



44 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

to my understanding for any pathfinding purposes as 
if they were cuneiform inscriptions on a slab from 
Nineveh. Still, every word John Gilbert said was 
afterward substantiated ; and how good reason I per- 
sonally had to thank my stars that those "fellows" did 
go astray, as well as who they were, and other matters 
concerning them, will all plainly appear before the 
close of this chapter. For the present, I refer to our 
quandary only as a remarkable illustration of the in- 
tuitional sixth sense acquired by a man like Gilbert, 
in protracted frontier experience. It must be remem- 
bered that since the ranch-wagon had passed down 
to the Republican, " ten days ago," the tremendous 
rain-storm, through which we came to Comstock's, 
had beaten the prairie hard enough to obliterate any 
vestige of travel on an ordinary road. 

We kept to the easterly, following John Gilbert's 
lead, passed the rise in the divide of which I have 
spoken, and came to the brink of a lofty bluff, from 
the base of which a broad plain extended two miles to 
the now clearly visible cotton-wood fringe along the 
Republican. We were compelled to ride along the 
edge for nearly three miles further, before we found 
a draw running back into the divide with sides suf- 
ficiently gradual to permit our descent to the river's 
first bottom. But none of the time demanded by this 
detour was thrown away. The view from the brink 
was one of the loveliest in nature. Broad level sun- 
shine flooded the green plain below us, and drifting 
cloud-shadows brought out the contour of the lofty 
blufis, which alternately projected into and receded 
from the plain on the river's further side. Here and 
there the fringing cotton-woods broke away, and let 
up to us pure blue glimpses of the river, itself reflect- 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 45 

ing the deeper sapphire of the summer sky. The air 
was wonderfully clear, — distance seemed partially 
annihilated. The White Rock Buttes, which we knew 
to be many miles away to the southward, came out 
clear and strong, so that we could see the undulations 
of their surface almost as plainly as if they were in 
the near foreground. The whole extent of territory 
within our vision was as fertile in appearance as the 
finest meadow-lands of the East, and so closely simu- 
lated cultivation in its smooth rolling downs and level 
fields that the eye continually looked for signs of hu- 
man residence, and found ever- fresh astonishment in 
the utter loneliness of the landscape. It was as if 
some great agricultural nation had suddenly been 
driven out of its ancient possessions, or stricken 
quickly asleep by magic in the deep green groves 
along the river-bank. But without apparent hyper- 
bole it is impossible to convey the strange impression 
of this lovely region of lawns without mansions, and 
farms without grange or barn. 

I am wrong in saying "without mansions ;" for on 
our descent to the broad alluvial level below the bluffs, 
the faces and voices of merry little colonists greeted 
us on every hand. The river-bottom was so riddled by 
the burrows of the prairie-dogs that we had to drive 
cautiously lest our horses should sink mid-leg deep at 
every step. I have travelled for miles in Nebraska 
and Colorado through the villages of these marmots ; 
but I never saw their life so teeming, and their habits 
so active, as here on the utterly undisturbed and un- 
frequented border of the Republican. The little crea- 
tures made the air lively with their chattering, which 
is a peculiar short shrill squeak rather than a bark, and 
the honeycombed soil as far as the eye could see was 



46 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

in motion with their antics. They were to be seen in 
every variety of position. Here sat one on the top of 
his burrow, completely out of his hole, resting on his 
haunches, nearly upright like a squirrel, and peering 
curiously at us with a pair of shiny black eyes till our 
neighborhood grew too close for his nerves. Another 
showed both head and tail out of his door, keeping 
his more vulixcrable middle below the edge of the 
earth-pile ; and the still more cautious dog exhibited a 
mere nose-tip above his entrenchment, chirping at us 
occasionally in a querulous manner, as if he were ask- 
ing what in the world could be our business in his 
municipality. We made several attempts to get spec- 
imens, but failed here, as we indeed did everywhere 
else where we attempted the thing. In the first place, 
it was almost impossible to calculate one's aim for an 
object projecting so short a distance from the ground; 
and in the second, when one's shots did not go over 
or fall short, there was always enough life left in the 
little animal to tumble him down his hole beyond 
the risk of capture. So we soon abandoned the job. 
The people on the Plains have an effective but rather 
tedious way of catching prairie-dogs alive. They draw 
a barrel of water to some isolated hole that does not 
communicate with the rest of a village, and drown the 
occupants out by deluging their cul-de-sac. A couple 
of days' confinement tames them so thoroughly that 
they can be handled with impunity, and when they 
are let loose again they cannot be driven from the 
neighborhood of the house, but burrow somewhere 
about the foundation or under the doorstep, coming 
at a whistle to be fed with corn as fearlessly as a 
house-bred puppy. Though called dogs, they have of 
course no right to the name, belonging to the rodents, 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 47 

and resembling in all respects the Eastern woodchuck 
more closely than any other of the tribe with which 
we are familiar. We shall find them repeatedly here- 
after in our progress to the Rocky Mountains, and 
have occasion to speak of their habits in various 
localities. I was offered a very pretty and well tamed 
pair of them at a station two hundred miles east of 
Denver, and much regretted my inability to close the 
bargain in . consequence of unwillingness to hamper 
myself with pets all the way to California. 

We found the Republican a clear stream, about fif- 
teen rods in width at the place where we struck it, — 
full of sandbars and quicksands, with treacherous 
banks of black and yellow loam, which came near cast- 
ing our horses when we tried to ford. We managed, 
however, to get across without " sloughing " where 
the water was only a little above our hubs. The 
southern edge of the stream was well timbered with 
fine old growths, mainly of elm and cotton-wood, un- 
der whose shadow we made our camp, and picketed 
our animals. We were on the Sioux hunting-ground ; 
and although our numbers and armament were suf- 
ficiently formidable to warrant us presumably against 
any attack, in accordance with frontier habits we dis- 
posed ourselves between the river and our large wag- 
ons, and stacked our guns within easy reach. 

Here the Eastern members of our party made their 
first acquaintance with an animal we had known by 
reputation since the earliest days devoted to the peru- 
sal of Mrs. Trimmer. The gifted beaver had left his 
"sign" on every tree adjoining the bank. If a work- 
man may be known by his chips, the admiration which 
we felt for an animal hitherto familiar only in the form 
of old-school hats, was thoroughly well grounded. We 



18 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

saw many trunks a foot in diameter, and some as thick 
as eighteen inches, gnawed through with an even 
bevel all round the girth, as neatly as an experienced 
wood-chopper could have cut them with an axe. 
Beside the trees, which the next strong wind or an- 
other night's felling-bee of the beavers would tumble 
to the ground, we found immense numbers of logs, 
varying from the full length of the trunk to three feet, 
lying near the severed stumps, awaiting deportation 
to some projected dam, or further truncation by the 
tools which had felled them. A neater workshop or 
nicer work than this on the bank of the Republican 
never existed among the professors of any handicraft. 
Where the logs had suffered their final reduction, they 
were of as uniform length as if they had been cut by 
the gauge, and their conical extremities of such pol- 
ished smoothness that one had to examine closely 
before perceiving the channels made by the ivory 
gauges of the little workmen. With true human dis- 
honesty, we helped ourselves freely from their wood- 
pile, and in a few moments had a blazing camp-fire 
and a kettle singing pleasant prophecies of coffee. 

Before the water boiled, and while the antelope was 
dressing for dinner (the last he should ever be invited 
to, poor little fellow ! ) a few of us strolled out beyond 
the timber with our field-glasses. We did not need 
them to discover that the crown of the whole adjoin- 
ing bluff was alive with buffalo. There were certainly 
quite a thousand in plain sight ; yet these were only 
the second line of outposts, — the first, as we had 
seen, having already been pushed across the river as 
skirmishers. Some of them stood on the brink of a 
clay precipice, fifty or sixty feet high, surveying the 
horizon, but without any apparent emotion in view of 



COMSTOCK'S. - A BUFFALO HUNT. 49 

our presence, while the farther ones cropped their way 
slowly through the grass without raising their heads. 
Two miles of plain and the height of the bluff inter- 
vened between us and them, accounting for a noncha- 
lance far greater than that of any other absolutely 
wild animal I am acquainted with. A herd of elk, 
deer, or antelope would have tossed up their heads 
and been away down the wind before we could have 
snapped our fingers at them. This bovine stolidity, 
as we shall see hereafter, is no result of misplaced 
confidence in human goodness, but a well based faith 
in the most admirable strategic arrangement known 
to the gregarious tribes of the brute world. 

My first experience of antelope-steak, was a gastro- 
nomic sensation, surpassing all the luxuries offered 
the palate by civilized bills of fare. The finest veni- 
son, the most delicate mountain mutton, afford no 
just comparison for it, though it possesses all the 
game flavor of the one, and the tenderness, without 
the inevitable talloivy suggestion, of the other. Spring- 
chicken, quail-breast, or frog's hind legs, are not more 
delicate ; and there is a flavor in the juice quite in- 
describable, belonging in fact to the idiosyncrasies 
and monopolies of nature. We had our antelope 
cooked in several modes : steak broiled on a gridiron ; 
a rib-roast, made by spitting the meat on a sharp 
stick thrust into the ground before the fire ; liver, 
as exquisite as sweet-bread, saide with a few scraps 
of salt pork ; and large coUops fried with the same 
relish to suit the hearty appetite of our frontiersmen. 
The only condiments we had with our meat were 
pepper, salt, and a can of the Shaker peaches, brought 
from our own party's commissariat ; nor would sauce 
of any piquant kind have been anything but an un- 

4 



§0 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

warrantaljle intrusion on the inmost Eleusinian mys- 
teries of gourmanderie. But I can imagine Soyer 
looking down on us from some fifth sphere of the 
world, where he is inventing a five hundredth 
method of treating ambrosia, and saying with tears 
of still human regret, " Ah ! I died too soon ! " 

After dinner, the artist opened his color-box, and 
began making a study of the antelope's head, which 
had been left entire for his purpose, while the two 
other gentlemen of our Overland party, accompanied 
by John Gilbert, Ansell Comstock, Butler, and myself, 
shouldered our guns and started for the bluff, to try 
stalking buffalo on foot. The afternoon was very 
warm, and the tramp through the grass of the river- 
bottom by no means easy ; but the enthusiasm of a 
first hunt would have carried our neophytes cheer- 
fully twice as far. 

We made our way to a precipitous draw, entering 
the bluff at a distance of three miles from our camp, 
and halted at its mouth to consider our course. On 
all the commanding prominences of the divide was 
stationed a giant bull, motionless, as if carven in 
bronze, noting our every gesture with red, inevitable 
eyes. We determined to hide in the cover of some 
low scrubby bushes, and wait until one of these senti- 
nels came down from his post to drink (the only cal- 
culable relaxation of his vigilance) at a neighboring 
puddle, which lay stagnant in a hollow of the draw. 
Having distributed ourselves, we waited with held 
breath for nearly an hour. The sentinel had forgot- 
ten us, we thought, for he began moving toward our 
ambush on a slow stately walk, and descended the 
side of the draw. We crept along behind the bushes 
on our hands and knees, intending to flank him, and 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT 51 

get to the top of the bluff among the herd without 
his knowledge. Just as we came abreast of the pud- 
dle where he stood irresolutely snuffing, with an evi- 
dent suspicion weighing on his crafty mind, we 
looked upward at the post he had just left, and there 
was another bull, as large and wary as the sentry off 
duty. We were out-maneuvered, after all ; and in 
revenge for our calloused knee-pans, I regret to say 
that we poured one simultaneous volley into the buf- 
falo at the puddle. But even an old bull-steak, or 
the juicy hump and tongue, which were the only val- 
uable part of him, were denied us by an excitement 
which confused our aim. Revenge must be cool to 
fire straight. As it was, we had the mortification of 
seeing him lash with his tail such inconsequential 
portions of his surface as we had hit at the shame- 
fully small range of one hundred and fifty yards, and 
without apparent inconvenience shamble away on a 
leisurely cow-trot, up the draw toward his comrade. 

" Cuss his tough hide ! " ejaculated John Gilbert. 
" Why didn't we shoot for him in the first place, in- 
stead o' tr3dng to creep round ? Then we'd a' had a 
good tongue for supper at least. Now we hain't got 
nothin'." 

Some one suggested that we had intended to find 
better game in the herd, — if we had got there. 

^^ Ef — that's very good — ^," said John Gilbert 
"Well, — we didnt. Now I don't believe in throwin' 
away a chance that's clost to you, for a maybe ten 
mile off. It's too much like Thompson's colt, that 
swam a r£yvin [ravine] to get a drink, 'cause he'd 
allays been watered on t'other side." 

Both the bulls had now moved out of sight, leav- 
ing their late sentry-station unoccupied. We con- 



52 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

eluded to move up the draw as fast as possible, and 
get to the top of the bluff before the panic had be- 
come general among the herd, — there to lie down 
out of sight, while confidence was getting restored, 
and finally to creep through the grass, near enough 
for another shot. We ran up the draw at double 
quick, bending as low as possible, and had nearly 
reached the upper debouchment, when a turn to the 
right uncovered us to another prominence, and there 
lowered another pair of vengeful red eyes, burning 
out of a shaggy fell of hair ! We dropped down in 
an instant, but too late. With a leisurely step, the 
grim old vedette retreated in good order on the main 
body. 

To gratify new men, whose desire to see and cap- 
ture buffalo was greater than any possible belief in 
human experience, our frontiersmen, telling us all the 
while that it was useless, assisted us for three hours 
in twice as many repetitions of this maneuver. We 
might as well have attempted to surprise Grant or 
Napoleon. Our failures were good for us ; for they 
taught us more of the habits of the buffalo than we 
could have learned at home from a course of lec- 
tures, or a monograph of many pages devoted to that 
animal. 

Had we not learned it with our own eyes, we 
never could have regarded a true statement of the 
case as anything but a traveller's tale, and would 
have filed it alongside of stories about the Gyascutus, 
or the pelican feeding her young with blood from 
her own breast. 

In very truth, the disposition of the buffalo 
troops is not surpassed by the most skillful general's 
arrangement of his forces. On the moment of reach- 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 53 

ing a new feeding-ground, they fall into an order which 
seems rather the result of masterly strategy and 
deep-laid plan than any unconscious result of mere 
brute instinct. If, as is the case at the season when 
we visited them, the cows are running with newly 
dropped calves, the sucklings and their mothers are 
placed in the very centre of the herd. Ju|t outside 
of these is a series of lines occupied by the weaned 
calves and yearlings. The next concentric layer con- 
sists of the young bulls, able to fight and shift pretty 
well for themselves, but not yet to be trusted with 
state secrets, or the keys of a defensive position. 
Outside of these come the veterans of the corps, — 
venerable bulls, who have crossed the Arkansas and 
the Platte many successive summers, — who know all 
the good feeding-grounds, and can exercise a general 
direction and supervision over the cows and the 
youngsters on the march for their first or second time. 
These form the advance of the army proper. From 
their ranks, by a principle of natural selection as un- 
erring as Darwin's, come the skirmishers, who recon- 
noitre for the advance, and the pickets, who protect 
the main body. For both these functions, the very 
oldest and most wary bulls are chosen ; but even here 
a distinction is made which it is interesting to notice. 
I repeatedly found maimed and invalid bulls among 
the veterans on picket-duty, but never once among 
those thrown forward as skirmishers. A tacit convic- 
tion seems to exist among the buffaloes that, while 
age and experience are necessary for responsible posts 
of observation, perfect soundness of physique must 
accompany these to constitute the proper pioneers of 
a campaign. A bull, carrying in his hip the ten-years' 
souvenir of an ounce ball, or an arrow-head, can limp 



64 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

back from a sentry-post, a mile or two outside the 
grazing herd, in time to stampede them by intelli- 
gence of an enemy; but nothing short of perfect 
wind and limb consists with the duty of going five or 
ten miles ahead of a corps, to scent and discover 
pasture. I have noticed their arrangement so widely 
that it is ifio mere theory with me, arising from an ad- 
miration which insists on pushing to the extreme a 
parallel between human and bovine sagacity. 

The bulls selected for sentry duty take up their 
position on all the prominences of the divide, leaving 
unoccupied, as we discovered on the day referred to, 
and always afterward, not a single point from which 
an approaching enemy may be commanded. The buf- 
falo, widely different from the antelope, depends 
scarcely at all on his scent; but those great round 
eyes of his, glowing in their earnestness or anger, like 
balls of fiery asphaltum, possess a length of range, 
and an inevitability of keenness, scarcely surpassed 
by those of any quadruped running wild on our con- 
tinent. Crouch and crawl where you may, you can- 
not enter the main herd without half a dozen pair of 
them successively, or at a time, focusing full upon you. 
Instant retreat of their owners follows ; at first no 
faster than a majestic walk, but, if your pursuit be 
hot, with increasing gradations of speed up to the 
heavy cow-gallop ; and then comes the stampede of 
the late quietly feeding herd, in a cloud of dust, and 
with a noise of thunder, like a general engagement. 

I have said it is impossible to get by the sentries ; 
but there is an exception for the case of a hunter, 
who, disguised in a wolf or antelope skin, is Avilling 
to crawl slowly, dragging a rifle, for two or three 
miles ; or the still rarer case of one who, lying down 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 55 

completely out of sight in the grass, wriggles him- 
self painfully along, like a snake, till he gets within 
range. 

Being somewhat of an enthusiast in hunting as well 
as everything else, and having no animal disguises at 
hand to aid me in the former method, I resolved, after 
our repeated failures recorded above, to try the latter 
manner of approach. Nobody cared to join me. The 
rest of the party went around the foot of the bluff to 
watch the success of Hunger, who had just come from 
the camp on horseback, and was charging with carbine 
slung and revolver drawn, up another draw about a 
mile to the north of our first advance. I stayed on 
top of the divide, and, lying down close to the grass- 
roots, began to work myself toward the herd. 

I kept my secret so well that a coyote passed only 
a little over pistol-shot from me before he suspected 
dano-er. I crawled and rested at intervals for more 

o 

than an hour, the herd getting all the time in plainer 
sight, until finally my patience became exhausted, 
and several buffalo wandered as near me as four 
hundred yards. My rifle was the Ballard ( a weapon 
of whose excellence I shall hereafter have occasion to 
speak more at large), and put up for five hundred 
yards, though I have killed an antelope with it at six 
hundred. I was sure I might rely on it at my present 
distance, if the buffalo-fever could only be held in 
check. I took deliberate aim, and succeeded in hitting 
a fine bull, though the ball went too low for his final 
settlement, and he walked away laboriously to lie 
down where I could not follow him. Just at that mo- 
ment a pair of rifles spoke in quick succession lower 
down the bluff. Two old bulls on the edge of the 
herd gave as many jumps, and began lashing their 



56 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

sides and shaking their heads after a most expressive 
manner. They had evidently been made to tingle 
somewhere, but were only provoked. For a moment 
they stood confronting each other, and considering 
themselves for the probable cause of the disturbance. 
Then the idea seemed to strike each simultaneously 
that the other had in some mysterious manner com- 
mitted the insult, and forthwith they rushed headlong 
against each other's adamant skulls with a shock which 
might have caved in an ordinary brick house. Then 
they locked horns, and pushed with such strength as 
nearly to lift each other on their hind legs ; then they 
tossed each other's heads sideways, broke hold, tram- 
pled the ground savagely, and joined their heads with 
another crash in desperate tourney. Another pair of 
shots broke up the comical misunderstanding, and set 
the whole detachment stampeding out of sight, after 
which I picked myself up a much more fatigued but 
decidedly a wiser man on the subject of penetrating 
herds, and joined my comrades just at the foot of the 
bluff, to find Hunger and a gentleman of our Over- 
land party responsible for the practical joke on the 
old bulls, at whose memory we were still laughing. 

It was long after sunset when we got back to camp. 
Our artist had made two or three studies of game and 
horses while we were "wasting our time" (as people 
always say to hunters who return light, though I 
notice that a nice pair of grouse or saddle of venison 
greatly dignifies the pastime) ; George Comstock had 
the remainder of the antelope cooking at a glorious 
fire, supplied as usual from the beavers' wood-pile ; 
and the aroma of our condensed coffee, just prepared 
by turning a gallon of water into a pint of paste, gave 
the wild pure air of the Plains a strangely incongru- 
ous but delicious flavor of civilization. 



COMSTOCK'S.-A BUFFALO HUNT. 57 

After finishing our meal, we spread our blankets 
for the night, and lay down upon them to smoke 
and talk away that nice mezzotint hour which in 
camp shades away from supper to bed-time. From 
the " Noctes Ambrosiante " down to the last book on 
the Adirondacks, Literature delights to dwell on such 
occasions. The romance and poetry, the wit and 
wisdom, of the camp-fire belong to a specialty as 
individual and charming as Boswell's Johnson and the 
gossip of Leigh Hunt. I wish I could believe myself 
adequate to the analyzing of our camp palaver ; for it 
was so racy that no tyro can hope to do it the least 
justice, and even an old hand might shrink from at- 
tempting to redraw the most original of frontier orig- 
inalities. 

The magical beauty and the strange suggestions of 
our place and time seemed to open every heart, infuse 
some genius into every mind. He must have had a 
vulgar nature indeed who could not be caught up into 
one short inspiration by the mere reflection upon 
where we were. Half a score of white men all alone 
in the heart of the virgin continent ; some far Sioux 
camp and the vast cohorts of the buffalo our nearest 
neighbors in place or sympathy. Above us was the 
great, pure dome of a heaven so free from all taint of 
earthly smoke that the stars seemed to have been let 
down like cressets leagues closer to our heads than in 
the city, and burned in diamond points without veil 
or trembling. The air was of that strange sweetness 
which, having no scent and being absolutely limpid, 
is still called spicy and balmy by hyperbole straining 
vainly for an adequate name. Our fire leaped up 
gladly, as if it tasted the young original oxygen with 
our own human relish ; and across its faint, vanishing 



58 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

edges came spectral glimpses of shivering trees along 
a distant bend of the Republican ; while boldly beyond 
the flame, the purple-black bluffs rose against the clear 
dark sky, their promontories merged by night into one 
long wall of shadow. Nothing broke the silence save 
now and then the yelp of a coyote, a night-bird's 
scream, our own subdued voices, and the lulling gur- 
gle of the river at our feet, on its way over dusky 
sand-bars to carry the message of the Rocky Mountain 
snows to the soft current of the Gulf and the mad 
waves of the Atlantic. We lay half-way between great 
mysteries, — in the lap of a loneliness as profound as 
the caves of the Nereids. 

But this loneliness mellowed instead of oppressing 
the quaint Western minds which were around us in the 
firelight. Some trifling remark about the hunt led to 
a queer idiomatic answer ; we began to laugh, and the 
fire of humor was straightway kindled to such a height 
that yarn after yarn, joke on joke, surjDrised the solemn 
dignity of nature. The simplest saying of any man 
who has lived like these pioneers much away from his 
kind takes the form of an aphorism. He has not been 
where he could give away the sap of his reflections 
before it crystallized ; he has not emptied his brains in 
loose small-talk; he has much bethought himself, — 
boiled himself down ; and when he speaks, be sure 
that it is " sugaring-off " time. I fancy the amount 
of thought is much the same in all men of quick intel- 
lects; they differ mostly in quality of thought and 
in the measure of its condensation. There is less dif- 
ference between the Yankee mountaineer and the 
Western plainsman than their local varieties of scene 
and habit would lead one to expect. The terseness 
and epigrammatic smack of both comes from isola- 
tion, and their talk has many resemblances. 



COMSTOCK'S.— A BUFFALO HUNT. 59 

Ansell Comstock was lamenting the loss of his 
lariat. Butler saw it lying on the ground beside him, 
and called his attention to the fact by the figurative 
utterance, "If it were a snake, it would bite you." 
Before I left, I had heard Ansell reproving one of the 
children for a greasy face, by asking him if he wasn't 
ashamed to sprain all the flies' legs that lit on him. 
Metaphors like these were common speech at the 
Comstocks'. 

Some of the best stories and homnots told by our 
frontiersmen had reference to "Old Trotter," an ec- 
centric genius who drives on the first stage out of 
Fort Kearney westward, and whose deeds and sayings 
will in future time become as historical as those of 
Tom Quick in Sullivan County, New York State, Jim 
Beckworth in Colorado, or any other original elevated 
by pioneer tradition among its demigods. Trotter 
improved on the old yarn to the effect " The weather 
would have been colder if the thermometer had been 
longer," by saying that he had been where it was "so 
cold that the thermometer got down off the nail." 
He once stopped his stage, and steadily gazed into the 
sky until all the passengers alighted and began gaz- 
ing with him. Somebody said, "What's the matter, 
driver? what are you looking at?" — "Can you see 
the comet ? " rejoined Trotter, earnestly. Again for a 
space everybody made thorough search through the 
heavens. Finally the most impatient passenger an- 
swered, "No! I can't! Where is it? " The rest as- 
sented to him, upon which Trotter very quietly said, 
"Wall, if none of us can find it, I don't believe 
there's any there, — so s'pose we g'lang." On one 
occasion, Trotter took a vacation and came down to 
Atchison for the purpose of recreating in that gdded 



60 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

capital, and beholding the gay world of fashion as 
displayed upon its costly Boulevards. It was imme- 
diately after pay-day, and Trotter was flush. After 
casting about for some method accordant with his 
original turn of mind by which his earnings might be 
dissipated with the highest degree of voluptuary sat- 
isfaction, he discovered that a band of minstrels was 
about to delight Atchison with a concert. He imme- 
diately went to the treasurer of the company, pre- 
vailed upon him to limit his number of tickets, and, 
forestalling the market, bought up every one of them 
himself Having thus effected what the brokers would 
call " a corner" in the world of amusement, he repaired 
to the hall at the hour of performance, occupied a seat 
in the centre, and had the entire concert to himself. 
Having thus experienced the sensation of solitary 
grandeur usually confined to kings and high digni- 
taries, he expressed himself fully satisfied with his 
money's worth, and the next morning departed for 
Fort Kearney, to drive until next pay day without a 
penny in his pocket. 

By far the most entertaining practical joke told of 
him (for the above has rather the complexion of a 
luxurious solemnity) is his stopping a man on the 
road who drove a miserable team of sick and aged 
little mules, with the ejaculation, " Look a'here, pil- 
grim ! I know a man that would give eight hundred 
dollars if he could only see them mules ! " " Why! " 
exclaimed the man, startled by such an unexpected 
prospect of luck, " Yeou da-on't say so ! Who is he ?" 
<^ Hes a blind man, " said Trotter ; " g'lang ! " 

With such stories as these, and many others belong- 
ing to that category of which a well known bel esprit 
once said to me, " 0, if one could only print the good 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 61 

things which mustn't be printed, what a book that 
would be ! " our frontiersmen kept us lively until the 
fire burned down to coals, and we felt ready to wrap 
ourselves in our blankets. 

The next five minutes, and we were as sound asleep 
in that divine bed-chamber of all-out-doors as any 
baby that ever lay in its cradle, ignorant of human 
woe. the change from the lately abandoned 
vigils and labors of long city nights, — from the 
three-o'clock retirings, the nervous tossings, the un- 
solved problems that write themselves on the bed- 
curtain of him who lies down without any extinction 
of his business impetus, or cooling of life's competi- 
tive fever ! It was a return to childhood ; and the 
mother nature stroked our foreheads into slumber 
with a hand of soft sweet air, the moment that we 
touched our rugged pillows. Years had blotted out 
the memory of true sleep from us : now it returned 
as a new sensation. 

With the earliest rays of spring sunshine we were 
on our feet again, and but a little later saw us as deep 
as we could get in the clear, bracing water of the Re- 
publican. Thoroughly refreshed, we made our break- 
fast off our own stores, — supper having dismissed the 
antelope, — and prepared for the grand foray against 
the buffalo herd, of which yesterday had been only the 
burlesque ; to which, indeed, yesterday was related 
in much the same sort of way as Mrs. Trimmer and 
natural history apprenticeships in general are re- 
lated to actual experience of lions. 

The two horses which had been attached to Hun- 
ger's buggy were both of them well trained hunters 
of our present game. They were accordingly put 
under saddle, — Hunger retaining the chestnut, a 



62 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

fine animal named Ben HoUaday, after the Overland 
Stage proprietor, and giving me " Nig," an excellent 
black horse, whose pluck and endurance I afterwards 
thoroughly tested. I owed this kindness partly to 
the fact that in my own private capacity I was very 
anxious for one good hunt on a horse that knew buf- 
falo, but mainly to Hunger's willingness to do a 
" courtesy to the Press," whereof, before leaving New 
York, I was a member. It both amused and gratified 
me to see the influence and interest of journalism 
extending so far beyond the reach of latest editions. 
No higher compliment could have been paid the 
profession. The last time I had used my press priv- 
ilege was in going to my parquet stall in the Acad- 
emy of Music, past a smiling door-keeper, who took 
tickets of other people. Here I vaulted to the 
saddle of one of the best hunters in the American 
wilderness, from the same professional spring-board ; 
and the two courtesies were but three weeks apart. 

Our artist, though a good shot, and capable of 
going to market for himself wherever there was any 
game, as well as most people, had seen enough buf- 
falo-hunting in other expeditions to care little for it 
now, compared with the artistic opportunities which 
our battue afforded him for portraits of fine old bulls. 
He accordingly put his color-box, camp-stool, and 
sketching-umbrella into the buggy, hitched a team 
of the wagon-horses to it, and, taking one of our own 
party in with him, declared his intention of visiting 
the battle-field solely as "our special artist." Thomp- 
son and John Gilbert accompanied us on their own 
horses. The rest stayed behind to watch camp. 

Fully recovered from the stampede of yesterday, 
the outer bulls of the herd, guarded by their sentinels. 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 63 

were grazing in plain sight along the top of the bluff. 
It was arranged that our four mounted men should 
lead in open order toward the foot of the bluff upon 
a quiet walk, and the moment the sentry bulls walked 
away to give the alarm, charge up the nearest practi- 
cable gulch that entered the bluff, getting to the top 
as quickly as possible. There each of us was to 
select his own bull out of the herd, and ride him 
down till he got within easy range. The buggy was 
to keep as close on our rear as it was able. 

Following this arrangement, we marched out from 
the shadow of the cotton-woods, and began pushing 
slowly through the grass toward our game. The 
sentries focused all their eyes on us before we had 
gone a quarter of a mile from covgr, but did not 
think us worth solicitude until we were a hundred 
and fifty rods closer. Then they began to paw un- 
easily, lash their sides, and stretch their necks with 
unequivocal earnestness. The buggy still kept right 
behind us, and we walked our horses about fifty feet 
apart. "We were a quarter of a mile from the foot of 
the bluff, when the first bull in front of us walked 
majestically away. A few rods further on, and all 
the sentries began a dignified leave-taking. " Now ! " 
cried Hunger, and the four horsemen spurred at once. 
We all took the same ravine, and scrambled up its 
sides (steeper than any hill where I had ever seen 
a horse pushed before) in hardly more time than I 
have taken to write the fact. "We gained the top of 
the bluff just before the sentries had reached their 
lines. The herd itself was not stampeded until we 
came in sight of its front. In an instant some un- 
countable hundreds of black, shaggy monsters threw 
their heads into the air with a force which lifted them 



64 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

on their hind hoofs, and, making these last pivotal, 
whirled about, as John said, " Like as if they had 
springs in 'em." Then, with a ponderous trot, the 
whole line was away. We were about two hundred 
and fifty yards from them when the stampede became 
general. 

This was altogether too far for effective shooting 
from the saddle, except for an Indian, or some ex- 
ceptional white man who had spent his life with the 
herds; and even such ride as close as possible before 
using bow or rifle. So we again clapped spurs to our 
horses, and hammered on toward our game, just as 
the buggy succeeded in climbing the bluff. 

The buffalo heard us, and quickened their flight 
to that clumsy cow-gallop of which I have before 
spoken. In a few minutes we were putting them to 
their trumps. They continued to lead our horses for 
a mile, running quite at the rate of ten miles an 
hour. But our animals had not yet "got their wind;" 
and so long as the bulls kept on tolerably even ground 
where we could follow them, every minute brought us 
fresh advantage. If they reached the jaws of some 
unexpected draw, they would plunge thirty feet down 
its almost perpendicular sides with as little hesitation 
as we would leap a ditch ; but no such ill luck befell 
us. They showed signs of distress in about five min- 
utes from the first burst, and blew hard, though there 
was no diminution in their speed, while our animals 
were warming into their work splendidly. 

I selected the bull nearest me, each of the other 
horsemen picked his quarry, and for ten minutes 
more I knew nothing, in the heat of my first buffalo 
fever, but streaming wind, a great oscillating patch 
of hair and hide beyond me, and a sound of tram- 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 65 

pling like steady thunder. My horse was crazy with 
enthusiasm. He snorted as he ran, and his eyes 
bulged full of fire. I had got within a distance of 
my game where I should have been ashamed to miss 
a hat-crown at standing fire. I whirled my carbine 
round from my back, and dropping the reins let 
drive for the back of the foreshoulder. Good inten- 
tion ! The slug went harmlessly far over my old 
monster's neck, as the plunge of my horse threw the 
muzzle into the air. I was disgusted with the world, 
but sought to retrieve myself by one more effort. 
My breech-loading Ballard, the best arm for sport of 
all kinds that is made on the continent, had another 
cartridge in it within ten seconds. I was still within 
fifty yards of my buffalo, and again I fired. This time, 
in spite of my greenness at shooting on the gallop, I 
put a ball home, but not in the right place. It struck 
too low in the flank, and just bled the buffalo without 
stopping him. A third time I fired, and without any 
more valuable effect. The one or two places in which 
an ounce ball will stop a buffalo-bull, bear a charmed 
life to the tyro in saddle-shooting. My horse began 
to be fearfully winded, — this was his first time out 
during the season ; he was a generous loan ; and 
though the buffalo was rapidly tiring, I desisted from 
the chase in a state of dissatisfaction with myself 
only commensurate with my previous enthusiasm. 

As I sat, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance 
translated to Kansas (I omitted to say that our ride 
from Comstock's had once more taken us out of Ne- 
braska), Thompson rode up, and invited me to go and 
look at his success. "Well, I never wished to be mean ; 
it was pleasant to see somebody's success ; and I ac- 
cordingly rode with him a mile away, to find a mag- 

5 



66 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

nificent bull stretched dead as a smelt on a high 
grassy knoll where he had fallen with one unerring 
shot, right through the heart. Through the right 
portion of the heart, it is necessary to add ; for I felt 
a little less ashamed of myself on learning that a 
buffalo will travel, and get clear of capture, with a 
slug through the apex of that organ, nothing short 
of disturbing its valvular arrangement having the 
immediate effect to bring him down. For the first 
time I came close enough to a wild native buffalo to 
examine him minutely, and was obliged to confess 
that he was one of the noblest specimens of the brute 
creation. Upright, the hump of this bull must have 
stood over five feet high. It was the hair-shedding 
season, and all abaft the hump his body was as bare, 
save in two or three isolated patches of frowzy, faded 
wool, as a Chinese dog. This fact was advantageous 
to the examination of his anatomy ; and though he 
carried a head and chest only less ponderous than a 
young elephant's, I found a beautiful shapeliness of 
curve about his haunches, a cleanness of line, and 
even slenderness in his hind legs, that looked rather 
like a member of the deer or elk family than any of 
the bovine tribes. 

I stood admiring him and felicitating Thompson, 
when Hunger appeared upon a distant divide, beck- 
oning me to him. I left the dead bull, and rode to 
ask what was wanted. When I got within ear-shot, 
Munger hollowed his hand before his mouth and 
roared, " Bring along your painter." Glad to be of 
more use to somebody than I had been to myself, I 
set out in search of the buggy. About a mile away, 
I found it rolling placidly along through the grass, 
after the well-meaning but veteran wagon-team, I 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 67 

told our artist that Hunger had something for him. 
At the news the buggy axles creaked joyfully ; the 
little old horses sprang forward on a gallop, with all 
the recalled freshness of their youth ; and in some- 
thing less than a quarter of an hour, we stood, or sat, 
beside Hunger and the champing Ben Holladay. 

That makes two : there were three of his company. 
He had ridden upon as big a bull as ever ran the 
Plains, stopped him with a series of shots from a 
Colt's army revolver, and was holding him at bay in a 
grassy basin, for our artist's especial behoof. He, on 
his part, did not need three words to show him his 
opportunity. He leapt from the buggy; out came 
the materials of success following him, and in a trifle 
over three minutes from his first halt, the big blue 
umbrella was pointed and pitched, and he sat under 
it on his camp-stool, with his color-box on his knees, 
his brush and palette in hand, and a clean board 
pinned in the cover of his color-box. 

Hunger's old giant glowered and flashed fire from 
two great wells of angry brown and red, burning up 
like a pair of lighted naphtha-springs, through a foot- 
deep environment of shaggy hair. The old fellow 
had been shot in half a dozen places. He was 
wounded in the haunch, through the lower ribs, 
through the lungs, and elsewhere. Still he stood 
his ground like a Spartacus. He was too much dis- 
tressed to run with the herd; at every plunge he 
was easily headed ofi" by a turif of Hunger's bridle ; 
he had trampled a circle of twenty feet diameter, 
in his sallies to get away, yet he would not lie 
down. From both his nostrils the blood was flowing, 
mixed with glare and foam. His breath was like a 
blacksmith's bellows. His great sides heaved labori- 



68 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ously, as if he were breathing with his whole body. 
I never could be enough of a hunter not to regard 
this as a distressing sight. Yet I could understand 
how Parrhasius might have been driven by the devil 
of his genius to do the deed of horror and power 
which has come down to us through the centuries. I 
seemed to see Prometheus on his rock, defying the 
gods. Kill a deer, and he pleads with you out of his 
wet, dying eye ; a bear falls headlong with a grunt, 
and gives up his stolid ghost without more ado, if 
the bullet is mortal ; but here was a monster whose 
body contained at least four deathly bullets, yet who 
stood as unflinching as adamant, with his face to the 
foe. It was the first time I had seen moral grandeur 
in a brute. 

Hunger, Thompson, and I rode slowly round the 
bull, attracting his attention by feigned assaults, that 
our artist might see him in action. As each of us 
came to a point where the artist saw him sideways, 
the rider advanced his horse, and menaced the bull 
with his weapon. The old giant lowered his head till 
his great beard swept the dust ; out of his immense 
fell of hair his eyes glared fiercer and redder; he 
drew in his breath with a hollow roar and a painful 
hiss, and charged madly at the aggressor. A mere 
twist of the rein threw the splendidly trained horse 
out of harm's way, and the bull almost went headlong 
with his unspent impetus. For nearly fifteen 'min- 
utes, this process wEs continued, while the artist's 
hand and eye followed each other at the double-quick 
over the board. The signs of exhaustion increased 
with every charge of the bull ; the blood streamed 
faster from wounds and nostrils ; yet he showed no 
signs of surrender, and an almost human devil of im- 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 69 

potent revenge looked out of his fiery, unblinking 
eyeballs. 

But our Parrhasius was merciful. As soon as he 
had transferred the splendid action of the buffalo to 
his study, he called on us to put an end to the dis- 
tress, which, for aught else than art's sake, was terri- 
ble to see. All of us who had weapons drew up in 
line, while the artist attracted the bull's attention by 
a final feigned assault. We aimed right for the heart, 
and fired. A hat might have covered the chasm 
which poured blood from his side when our smoke 
blew away. All the balls had sped home ; but the 
unconquerable would not fall with his side to the foe. 
He turned himself painfully around on his quivering 
legs ; he stiffened his tail in one last fury ; he shook 
his mighty head, and then, lowering it to the ground, 
concentrated all the life that lasted in him for a mad 
onset. He rushed forward at his persecutors with all 
the elan of his first charges ; but strength failed him 
half way. Ten feet from where we stood, he tumbled 
to his knees, made heroic efforts to rise again, and 
came up on one leg ; but the death-tremor possessed 
the other, and with a great panting groan, in which 
all of brute power and beauty went forth at once, he 
fell prone on the trampled turf, and a glaze hid the 
anger of his eyes. Even in death those eyes were 
wide open on the foe, as he lay grand, like Caesar be- 
fore Pompey's statue, at the feet of his assassins. 

We then returned to Thompson's bull, where our 
artist sat down to make another study, leaving the 
buggy to return to camp and send out a wagon for 
our meat, and ourselves to set forth in search of new 
adventures. 

One of Thompson's intensest yearnings was to get 



70 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

some cow-meat. This laudable desire had been frus- 
trated in all the hunts he had joined since the buffalo 
left the Arkansas this season. He liked hump and 
tongue very well, but naturally preferred game which 
he could use more economically than simply to cut 
out these, and leave the carcass. So he proposed a 
flank movement, by which we might get nearer to 
the herd. 

Munger had an equal anxiety to lasso some young 
calves. He had been very successful in this sport sev- 
eral summers before, and secured some capital speci- 
mens to send East, for curiosity, or to domesticate 
among the ranches for breeding. I \fas surprised to 
learn how frequent was the latter practice in this re- 
gion. Numbers of the settlers between Atchison and 
Fort Kearney had reared buffalo calves, and crossed 
them with domestic cattle, the hybrids proving very 
serviceable working-cattle, somewhat surly and un- 
manageable at times, but possessing greater speed 
and endurance than the common ox. I was further 
told, on excellent authority, what seemed hard of be- 
lief, and under the circumstances was impossible of 
tangible demonstration, that this hybrid had been 
found perpetuable. This is a curious fact, when we 
recollect how much more the cow and the buffalo 
differ from each other than the horse and the ass, 
whose mules are still sterile. I was equally anxious 
with Munger to get a nice pair of calves, as we were 
sufficiently near railroad communication to have sent 
them East to await our return. 

Accordingly John Gilbert and ourselves set out in 
a nearly southwesterly direction, leading diagonally 
between the main course of the Republican and a 
line of tall, conical mounds, called the White Rock 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 71 

Buttes, parallel with the river six miles further south. 
We had gone about three miles across a rolling coun- 
try, much like the plain traversed from Comstock's, 
without seeing anything but the rear of the herd 
lately stampeded by us, when John Gilbert caught 
sight of a much larger herd, feeding a little nearer 
the Republican than our line of march. He proposed 
that we should separate, and, by alarming this herd at 
different points, stampede them in such confusion as 
to break up their order, make them spread out and 
open their centre to attack. Hunger looked through 
his field-glass, and was sure he saw calves ; Thompson 
took a look, and beheld the cows necessarily accom- 
panying ; I saw buffalo of some description or other, 
which was all that was needed to make me join the 
rest in assent to John Gilbert's proposition. 

Hunger, Thompson, and myself went to the south- 
erly ; John Gilbert alone took toward the river side, 
with the intention of stampeding the herd back into 
our hands. We had gone a little over a mile when 
the thundering of hoofs announced that John had suc- 
ceeded, and the next minute the herd came tearing 
over a high divide right toward us. As they saw us, 
they checked their impetus ; but so near us did they 
get that each of us might have shot his bull without 
difficulty, had our design been so childish and mur- 
derous. As it was, we left our rifles alone, not intend- 
ing to use them again till we could use the lasso with 
them. Still, no calves nor cows were visible. I be- 
gan to despair of ever seeing them. 

As the herd reached us, it swung its front round 
at right angles, and made about westerly. Hunger, 
Thompson, and I immediately rushed at it with all 
speed, and it separated into roughly divided detach- 



72 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ments, one of which each of us selected to chase 
down. The herd was larger than any we had yet 
seen. It was impossible that our glasses should have 
deceived us. There were cows and calves somewhere 
in the herd, and this was the way to find them. 

In five minutes after I had selected my squad for 
attack, I was entirely separated from my companions. 
The ground was in splendid order for running ; the 
lay of the land as favorable ; my horse had acquired 
his " second wind," and his enthusiasm fully equaled 
my own. I never knew the ecstasy of the mad gal- 
lop until now. Like young Lochinvar, " We stayed 
not for brake, we stopped not for stone." Some 
draws which we crossed, made me shudder afterward 
as I thought of them. Now we were plunging with 
headlong bounds down bluffs of caving sand, fifty feet 
high, and steep as a fortress glacis, while the buffalo, 
crazy with terror, were scrambling half-way up to the 
top of the opposite side. Now we were following 
them in the ascent, my noble Nig using his fore-hoofs 
more like hands than any horse I ever saw before, 
fairly clawing his way up, with every muscle tense 
through passionate emulation. Now we were on the 
very haunches of our game, with a fair field before 
us, and no end to pluck and bottom for the rest of the 
chase, the buffalo laboring heavily, and their immense 
fore-parts coming down on their hoofs with a harder 
shock at every jump. Now we saw a broad, slippery 
buffalo-wallow just in time to leap it clear ; now we 
plunged into the very middle of one, but Nig dug 
himself out of the mud with one frantic tug, and kept 
on. Still we came closer to our buffaloes, and sud- 
denly I heard a loud thunder of trampling behind 
me. 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 73 

I looked over my shoulder: there in plain sight 
was another herd, tearing down on our rear. As I 
afterward discovered, this was the herd stampeded in 
separate columns by Hunger and Thompson, joined 
again after making their detour. For nearly a mile 
in width stretched a line of angry faces, a rolling 
surf of wind-blown hair, a row of quivering lanterns, 
burning reddish-brown. The column was as deep as 
the line. I quickly bethought myself: It is death to 
get involved in a herd if my horse stumbles. If 
I have both pluck and luck to ride steadily in the 
line of the stampede until I can insinuate myself 
laterally, and make a break out through the side 
of the herd, all may go well with me, as it has with 
several hunters of my acquaintance, caught in this 
predicament. It was death to turn back. I should 
be trampled and gored to death. I should be wiped 
out like a grease-spot, and Nig with me, for the ter- 
ror of the herd was too extreme for me to hope to re- 
stampede them, with Hunger and Thompson prob- 
ably somewhere close on their rear. 

All this flashed through my mind in an instant. Nig 
was steadily shortening the distance between me and 
the herd ahead. I had just made up my mind to ride 
as long as he would stand in the line of the stampede, 
when the herd before me divided into two columns to 
pass around a low butte I had seen before. Quick as 
lightning this providential move of theirs suggested 
the means of my salvation. I made for the mound, 
reached its summit, and to Nig's great disgust, though 
he was fearfully short-breathed, and trickling with 
rivulets of sweat, halted him instantly to await the 
rear column. I had not many minutes of anxiety. 
The herd saw me fifty rods off, but, as I expected, 



74 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

paid no more attention to me than if I had been a 
grass-blade. Nor could they, if they would. All 
stampedes are alike, whether of men or animals. For 
the front line to swerve is to be knocked down and 
slain instanter. This vis a tergo gives the van a cour- 
age of despair, while it takes away all option of move- 
ment. So the angry front line of faces saw me with- 
out fear. I had only a minute of certain life. The 
next would see me safe or beaten to a mummy. I 
dismounted, held my horse's head away from the 
coming herd, and faced it myself, with the rein over 
my arm and my rifle poised. As the herd got within 
a hundred yards of the mound, I delivered one stead- 
ily aimed ball at the fore-shoulder of the nearest bull. 
He gave a single wild jump, and began limping on 
three legs. I had done for him. For a few seconds, 
fear of his pressing comrades gave him enough extra 
speed to keep up with the rest ; but before the line 
reached the foot of the mound, he had tumbled, and 
the whole host was rushing over him. This obstacle, 
and the terror of his fate, sent the first lateral panic 
into the hearts of the herd. Once more, as the front 
line came so close that I could almost have jumped 
my horse on to their backs, I fired my rifle again. 
The ball did no damage to any but itself, flattening 
like putty on the thick-matted Gibraltar of one old 
bull's frontispiece, but it served my turn, and split the 
herd. They divided just in time to avoid being 
crowded over the mound by their rear, and in a mo- 
ment I was standing on a desert island, in a sea of 
billowing backs, flowed around on either side by a 
half-mile current of crazy bufialoes. 

Here was abundant opportunity to shoot, but not 
the slightest anxiety for doing so. I was safe ; I had 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 75 

such a view of buffaloes as I never could have ex- 
pected, never would enjoy again. This was all-suffi- 
cient to me. I stood and studied the host with de- 
vouring eyes, while my horse snorted and pulled at 
the bridle in a passion of enthusiasm. 

The herd were about five minutes in passing me. 
During that time I saw the calves which Munger was 
looking for, and Thompson's much desiderated cows, 
beside numerous yearlings and two-year-olds, both 
bulls and heifers. There also appeared here and there 
a veteran bull, carrying about him the marks of bat- 
tle in the form of a stiff or broken .leg, or a bad scar 
in the flank. One old fellow made as good time on 
three legs as any of his comrades on four, though his 
useless member was in front, where most of the strain 
falls in running. His progress was absolutely com- 
ical. He reminded me of an aged ape hopping, with 
one hand on the ground to steady him, and his coun- 
tenance wore the most whimsical expression, his mat 
of hair being torn off in places, so as to disclose more 
of his features than I ever saw in any other buffalo. 
As he scrambled past in steady-by-jerks. Dundreary 
style, he seemed saying, " To be bothered in this way 
at my time of life ! " 

When the herd had passed, and joined the body I 
had lately been chasing, the combined force stopped 
about half a mile ahead. I turned, as the last lag- 
gards panted by the mound, and, for the first time 
since I reached my elevation, paid attention to the 
westward. Then I understood why the stampeders 
had halted so soon. They had come up with the 
main herd! 

Yes, there, beyond peradventure, in my plain sight, 
grazed the entire buffalo army of Middle Kansas. As 



76 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

far as the western horizon the whole earth was black 
with them. From a point a mile in front of me their 
rear line extended on the north to the bluffs bound- 
ing the Republican, on the south to the very sum- 
mits of the White Rock Buttes, an entire breadth of 
more than six miles. I had no way of measuring the 
unbounded plain, looking westerly ; but a man on 
horseback, in the clear air of the region, and with a 
field-glass of Voigtlander's as good as mine, can recog- 
nize an object of the size of a buffalo at ten miles' dis- 
tance. I will not add my name to the list of travel- 
lers who have stated undeniable truths that nobody 
would beUeve. When I say that a hundred square 
feet of room was an exaggerated average allowance 
to the individual buffalo in the close-packed herd be- 
fore me, I have contributed all the elements neces- 
sary to each of my readers for his personal calcula- 
tion of the number in sight. I never saw any Eastern 
acquaintance who would credit me when I stated my 
own estimate diminished by one half Let it be 
enough to acknowledge that it reaches millions. As 
for comparisons, flies on a molasses barrel, ants on an 
ant-hill, tadpoles in a puddle, all these strong but vul- 
gar similitudes fail to express the ideas of multitude 
awakened by looking at that mighty throng. Arith- 
metic is as petty to the task as the lightning calcular 
tor to the expression of a hurricane. I have seen the 
innumerable herd of laughing waves in a broad sunny 
sea ; I have seen the same multitude lashed to mad- 
ness by a tropical cyclone ; I remember my first and 
my succeeding impressions of Niagara ; but never did 
I see an incarnation of vast multitude, or resistless 
force, which impressed me like the main herd of the 
buffalo. The desire to shoot, kill, and capture utterly 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 77 

passed away. I only wished to look, and look till I 
could realize or find some speech for the greatness of 
Nature that silenced me. 

I had gazed for nearly an hour, when it suddenly 
occurred to me that more than twice that time had 
elapsed since I saw any of my comrades. I referred 
to the sun, for I had no watch in my hunting-shirt, 
and saw that it was at least three o'clock in the after- 
noon. I took one last look at the buffaloes, and came 
down from my mount of vision. The way back I was 
quite certain of It seemed the easiest thing in the 
world to retrace my steps. I remounted Nig, and be- 
gan pushing for home. 

I remembered that our camp was nearly clue north 
from a certain characteristic butte of the White Rock 
range. I resolved to bring this butte abreast of me, 
travelling down the middle of the plain, between it 
and the Republican, then to strike due north for the 
river, over the ground which had become familiar to 
us through two days' hunt. 

This matter was easier to promise than accomplish. 
I little knew the deception of which a traveller was 
susceptible on these endlessly uniform divides. I 
might almost as well have hoped to travel by foam- 
marks on the waves of the sea as by any idiosyncra- 
sies in this rolling sward. But as yet I was ignorant 
and happy. 

My chief troubles were the now plainly apparent 
fatigue of my horse, reacting from his late enthusi- 
asm ; a pair of badly sun-burnt hands, the bridle one 
of which, being the more exposed, was swollen into a 
very respectable red velvet pincushion, and felt as if 
it had been dipped in a jar of aqua-fortis. I was also 
exceedingly hungry, and had been unwise enough to 



78 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

leave camp without so much as a piece of hard-tack 
in my pocket. I might at least have brought out a 
canteen of pure water ; but not having anticipated a 
protracted absence from the river, I had neglected 
even that, and began to have a tongue like a tile. 
My horse gradually became so used up, that I lay 
down with his long halter in my hand, and let him 
crop his dinner by piecemeal while I rested, for fif- 
teen minutes at a time. I found a large sunflower, 
whose root I pulled up and ate ; but the food was 
rather scanty, and whetted my appetite as a relish, in- 
stead of satisfying it like a meal. But my greatest suf- 
fering presently came on in the form of intense thirst. 
Before I reached the point abreast of the White 
Rock Butts, whence I was to commence my north- 
erly course, I was in veritable torment. I felt like a 
German Zwieback, dry-rusked through and through 
by a sun which pelted mercilessly on that shadeless 
waste, hot as our Eastern July. I was reduced to such 
a deplorable demoralization that I cheerfully, nay 
joyfully, consented to relieve myself, over and over 
again, in a way at whose very mention I had shud- 
dered when the old hunters told me of it in camp. 
I lay down by the side of those stagnant rain-puddles 
which stand in basins of hard-pan on the top of the 
divides, and, plunging my face in to the very eye- 
brows, drank ravenously, right over the hoof-marks 
of the buffaloes. Sometimes the water was thicker 
than cream with mud; sometimes red with the de- 
jections of the herd ; always as hot as blood, — yet I 
thought no more of these things than if I were a 
buffalo myself For the first time I fully understood 
the sufferings of travellers in the desert. When I 
afterward came to experience those sufferings my- 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 79 

self, I found them but little worse than that trial on 
the Kansas Plains. 

Reaching the line of range I had selected, I struck 
due north for the river, sure of finding our camp and 
overjoyed at the prospect. I looked from the edge of 
the bluff, after a toilsome trudge of three miles on a 
tired horse, and saw everything to convince me that 
my course had been correct. Between the bluff and 
the river stretched a swale of dry grass, bounded 
by two expanses of green herbage ; the first bottom 
of the river descended by two well-marked curving 
terraces ; there was a fine old cotton-wood grove, 
with a pair of gaps in it where the beavers had been 
felling ; above this grove I saw a broad yellow sand- 
bar running diagonally half-way across the Repub- 
lican ; and to the eastward the river made a short 
curve toward me, narrowing the view of its bank 
to a mere strip, which was studded thickly with new 
timber-growth. Every feature which I have related 
was the fac-simile of a corresponding environment 
about our camp. 

I descended, as I thought, through the very draw 
by which we had yesterday approached the buffalo 
on foot. The likeness became more and more perfect 
as I went down. The same grotesque forms pre- 
sented by the profile of a precipice of indurated 
sand, the same arrangement of bushes, the same 
puddle to which the relieved sentinel came down 
when we fired our first shots, the same well-worn 
buffalo-path leading through the draw to the river. 

I chirruped cheerfully to Nig, as in assurance that we 
should soon reach home, and struck into the broad 
river-bottom with renewed patience. I reached the 
river without seeing any novel feature in the land- 



80 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

scape, entered the cotton-wood grove, came to the 
very water's edge, — and found nowhere a trace of 
human kind. 

I thought it must be a joke. The party had played 
some trick on me. They were punishing me for my 
long absence by hiding in the timber near by. But 
then where were the wagons? Where the horses, 
the wheel-tracks, — above all, where was the burnt 
spot left by our camp-fire ? 

I had to confess that this was not our camp. It 
needs no explanation to understand how with that 
confession came a full assurance of the fact that I was 
about as badly lost as it is possible for a man to be. 
If there were one place exactly like our camp, there 
might be fifty. And so there were. Should I go up 
or down the river ? 

I concluded on the latter course. I calculated as 
nearly as possible my distance from home when I 
reached the main herd, and found it unlikely that I 
could have made enough return with my tired horse 
to have brought me abreast of the camp again. I set 
off along the edge of the river timber, at the best rate 
my horse could travel. A mile down I was stopped 
by an impassable swamp, running entirely across from 
the foot of the bluff to the river bottom. The water 
vegetation in it was almost tropically rank, and its 
pools swarmed with ducks. I had no time or thought 
for shooting. I dismounted from my horse, and, find- 
ing the bluff loose and sandy ten feet up, I led him 
along its slope around the marsh, in momentary dan- 
ger of his falling on me, and both of us going into 
the bog. 

We now entered a thick wood, containing some of 
the grandest old trees I ever saw in my life. They 



COMSTOCK'S.— A BUFFALO HUNT. 81 

were mostly elms and cotton-woods, with an occasional 
oak, primeval in their size and luxuriance, making 
the ground under them black with the shadow of 
their dense foliage, and exhibiting tree-forms which 
might fill an artist with rapture. They grew entirely 
without underbrush, on a damp, velvety lawn of short 
grass, expanding their immense arms at the top of 
shafts a hundred feet in height, locking them together 
into their impenetrable roof, with graceful curves and 
grotesque angles, that surpassed anything in human 
architecture. It was one of those places continually 
met with in this region, which so strongly simulate 
human cultivation that the traveller finds it almost 
impossible to believe he is not in the park of some 
lordly demesne. To this feeling all wild animals 
contribute, but far beyond the rest, the gregarious 
buftalo, by making paths so like those of a well reg- 
ulated country-seat that everybody exclaims at the 
first sight of them, " Inhabited after all ! " These are 
thoroughly well beaten, straight as a gardener could 
lay them out, or following the conformation of the 
land in curves that could not be bettered. To add 
to the human suggestions of the delicious grove I 
had entered, two such paths crossed each other in its 
centre. I found one of them a pleasant relief to my 
tired horse. 

Pursuing it for half a mile, we emerged from the 
grove, or more properly became immersed in a 
thicket. Thorn-bushes hanging covered with wisps 
of buffalo hair recently scraped off, alternated with 
springy saplings, which in turn tore and flogged us, 
till I should have been driven back had there been 
any way out of the fix except forward. Patience, 
and an occasional use of my bowie-knife, at last 



82 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

hacked us out to daylight ; but the view that broke 
on me was as little satisfactory as the thicket. A nar- 
row rift, eight feet deep and three wide, its nearer side 
a moist, springy clay, opened at my feet, discharging 
a small stream into the river. I tied my horse for a 
moment, plunged down into the fissure, and drank 
till it seemed as if I should burst. Climbing up again, 
I surveyed the opposite bank. It was the side of the 
main bluff itself, thirty feet high, and slanting at an 
angle of little less than seventy degrees. The river 
had curved around to meet it past the marsh and 
wood which I had just traversed, cutting away the 
first bottom entirely. But this I did not know till 
afterward. I explained the nearness of the river to 
the precipice, by supposing that the bed of the for- 
mer had fallen within the last two miles sufficiently 
to bring the first bottom as high above it as the blufif 
here appeared. Upon this, I reasoned that I must, 
after all, have struck the stream too far below our 
camp. Still, rather than turn back through the 
thicket, I would try crossing the rift and ascending 
to the top of the bluff, where I would have smooth 
ground for my return. The difficulty was how to 
get my horse over. There was no standing-room for 
a single pair of hoofs at the base of the bluff across 
the ditch. I accordingly built myself a bridge. In the 
first place, I flung lumps of clay from the springy side 
into the fissure, until I had a surface nearly enough 
even with the edge to receive a superstructure of 
sticks hacked from the thicket. On this treacherous 
fascine, which it took me a perspiring hour to com- 
plete, I managed to support the hind hoofs of my 
horse till he could dig his front ones into the bluff. 
I then ran before him, caught his bridle, and scaled 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUKT. 83 

the height, with the noble fellow scrambling up after 
me as deftly and almost as perpendicularly as a climb- 
ing monkey. I never saw a horse east of the Mississippi 
that could have comprehended and met the situation 
like Nig. Whoever came after us to our bridge of 
fascines, must have thought that a very badly edu- 
cated company of beavers had been there. 

I wandered for a quarter of a mile down the river. 
The banks grew higher and higher with every rod. 
I found no sign of human life anywhere, save the 
remains of a Sioux camp. The occupants had not 
been long gone ; some of their lodge-poles lay in a 
bundle near the fire-place, and around it were still 
standing the crotched sticks on which they hung 
their pots. I had no anxiety to meet Sioux ; and as 
the hope of encountering my companions seemed 
increasingly slight in this direction, I turned and 
began retracing my steps, leading my horse by the 
bridle. Poor Nig was so battered by his day's strain 
and hunger that I could make better time in this 
way than on his back. 

A new misfortune now appeared to me. What 
scriptural writer says that trouble does not come out 
of the ground ? He had never contemplated a series 
of draws, with precipitous sides, running a mile into 
the heart of a bluff upon whose edge he was travel- 
ling, with a tired horse, and used-up personality. 
Here was a trouble resulting from the ground, which 
might well excuse imprecation. 

Did none of my readers ever get into a situation 
where Nature's obstacles seemed to have been created 
on purpose for him ? I had descended one of these 
reentrant draws at imminent peril to my neck, and 
climbed the other side with a difficulty only con- 



84 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

quered by desperation ; I had made a detour of at 
least a mile, to get around another one, which looked 
absolutely untraversable ; I now came to a third, 
with sides literally precipitous. Its walls were fifty 
feet high, and ran sinuously, eating about into the 
plain further than I could see, with numerous lateral 
ramifications. After several vain attempts to flank 
these trenches of Nature, I came back to the edge of 
the bluff, and considered myself I was lost, faint, 
sick ; my horse quite worn out, and the sun not an 
hour high. I was uncomfortably near the Sioux, 
who a few days before had taken a Colorado soldier, 
on a hunt from Fort Kearney and lost like myself; had 
robbed him of horse, ammunition, arms, all he had in 
the world ; pulled out his beard, and left him naked 
as he was born, forty miles from the nearest white 
trapper. I made up my mind that I would descend 
the first practicable draw, cross the river, picket my 
horse, make a supper of sunflower-roots and wild 
onions, and camp down under my saddle-blankets, and 
with the returning light renew my search for our 
camp, along the northern and more level bank of the 
Republican. I was pretty sure that I could find the 
ford we had crossed, by hunting for our wheel-tracks. 
I accordingly led my horse down the nearest ramifi- 
cation of the great draw, and with great difficulty, 
for the bottom was a perfect slough, escaped from my 
embarrassments upon the low level of the river bank. 
Before I leave this entanglement of horrors, I must 
not omit to say that just before descending, I shot 
my first antelope. He was grazing on the side of a 
divide, quite six hundred yards off, to the naked eye 
appearing only a small brown spot in the sunshine. 
I wanted meat so badly that I never asked myself 




HUFKALO CALVES. See page 70. 






'-^-■^^ \ 




WOLVES ATTACKING A WnrNDED I!l KKAI.O. See piiite Si; 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 85 

the question how I was going to get round to him, 
and pack him home. He had not seen or scented 
me when I lay down in the grass and poised my Bal- 
lard, which nominally put up for five hundred yards, 
but at that distance invariably threw the ball above, 
unless allowance was made for its habits. I spent 
as much time in calculating my aim as a boy of ten 
over a sum in division, and fired resting on my 
elbows. My brown spot went up into the air with 
one convulsive spring, turned a cart-wheel, and fell 
on his side in his tracks. The next moment I saw 
how impossible it was to get him, but went down the 
draw excusing the murder by a promise to go after 
him to-morrow. When that morrow came, he was a 
clean skeleton, picked by the wolves. Though I had 
not the meat, I had gained a pride and a confidence 
in my weapon which were everything to a man in my 
position, — and hugged it close to my breast ere I 
swung it round to my back, not knowing how often 
it might have to save my life before I saw camp 
again. I had many occasions to love that rifle 
afterwards ; and I should be ungrateful indeed, if I 
did not say that the Ballard breech-loader is, without 
a single exception, the best arm for Western work 
that was ever invented. In good hands, it fires seven 
balls a minute with perfect accuracy, having all the 
advantages ever practically used in a repeater ; it is 
the simplest in its mechanism of all breech-loading 
weapons, and never once got out of order during a 
daily use of eight months. Its breech is absolutely 
powder-tight, through the very construction of its 
cartridge ; this cartridge is an entire load, including 
percussion material, and cleans the bore in leaving it; 
nothing can be more portable, simpler, safer. The 



86 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

man who is competent to use a rifle at all need never 
miss with it, and one who has made its acquaintance 
will never be without it in the wilderness. K this be 
high praise, I can only say that every expert who has 
seen its performance agrees with me. Over and over 
again in the far West, old hunters became so enam- 
ored of it as to offer me its original cost, several times 
told. 

I was half way across the first bottom when the 
sun went out of sight. Simultaneously with his 
disappearance, the wolves seemed to be assembling 
for jubilee. In every quarter I could see one of 
either the big gray or the coyote variety. They did 
not seem alarmed at me, and sat up on their haunches 
like so many shepherd dogs, in a circle around me and 
poor tired Nig, making the air dismal with their dis- 
cordant howls. I was not afraid of them, for they 
never attack a man unless mad with hunger ; but 
their presence, worn out as I was, filled me with 
gloom and foreboding. They seemed like harpy old 
women at a country funeral, crowding around to get 
a last look at the corpse. Moreover, they might at- 
tack my picketed horse in force during the night; 
and personal affection for him after my trial of his 
intelligent faithfulness, to say nothing of my own 
loneliness if he were killed, made me very anxious 
not to lose him. 

Despite the depression begotten of the wolves, my 
spirits had still to touch their zero point. Crossing 
the river bottom about a hundred rods from me, I 
presently saw a man, coatless, hatless, and, to my 
field-glass, of a rich-brown complexion, black-haired, 
and carrying a gun. So this was the meaning of the 
deserted Sioux camp on the bluff! How far off were 
the rest of the band ? 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 87 

I knew it would not do to show the white feather. 
I leaped on my horse, whom I had still been leading, 
and rode toward the savage, hallooing with all my 
might. He stopped for a minute, eyed me curiously, 
took down his gun, thought better of it, and left for 
the neighboring timber. Upon this I put spurs to 
poor Nig, who met the exigency with all his reserve 
capital of speed. In five minutes more I was on the 
brink of the river. 

Directly opposite, on the northern bank, stood a 
snow-white tent, and above it floated St. George's 
Cross ! 

If Robinson Crusoe, in one of his goat hunts, had 
suddenly come to the offtce of the British consulate, 
he could not have been taken more aback by that 
sight than I by this ! 

I rubbed my eyes to make sure that it was not a 
dream of exhausted nerves and an empty stomach. 
But my horse gave a joyful neigh, which was quickly 
answered by several of the same sort, in the tent's 
immediate neighborhood. I knew horses were not 
given to nervous hallucination, and, without any at- 
tempt to explain a verdict which could not be im- 
pugned, plunged Nig into the Republican, and forded 
to the opposite shore. A bluff, jolly Englishman, of 
undeniable Pall Mall flavor, hailed me as I touched 
the bank, and pointed out the access to his camp. 
This was pitched on high ground, surrounded by a 
slough except at one narrow point, which was cov- 
ered with the densest forest and undergrowth. If 
an Englishman's house is his castle, his camp in this 
instance was still more so. Twenty resolute white 
men could have defended it against a thousand Sioux. 
Nothing in the defenses of Washington was stronger 



88 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

by natural position. If the Rev. Clarence FitzPotts, 
with his love of the Mediaeval had been there, he 
would have erected a ruined donjon keep upon it 
immediately. 

With all the aid of friendly showing, I spent a full 
half-hour in getting round to shake the hands I had 
seen extended to me on my landing. I never knew 
that the sight of a British flag, and the sound of the 
British accent, could make me as glad as I was when 
I reached the camp. I was received with a genuine 
cordial welcome, which made me forgive Liverpool 
and the " Morning Post." My new acquaintance and 
his comrades were members of Lord Lyons's embassy, 
out on a buffalo hunt like myself. They had come all 
the way from Washington to see a herd, but as yet 
had not sighted a single bull. I was able to give 
them cheering news, and encourage them with the 
prospect of approaching reward for a difficult jour- 
ney. They had turned off in the wrong direction 
from the high northern divide, and found a series of 
bad draws and rough hammocks, which much ham- 
pered their progress. It was as John Gilbert had said. 
His unerring eye had not failed him. I now saw what 
a good thing for me it had proved that they went 
astray. Such a happy providence is not vouchsafed 
to one man in a thousand as this discovery of white 
friends and civilized shelter, when lost in the wild 
heart of the Continent. 

It is hardly necessary to say that the Indian I had 
seen proved to be an attache of the party. He had 
gone out hunting, and, when he returned, had a story 
as interesting as my own, about a savage figure start- 
ing from the grass. 

My horse was picketed. I had made amends for 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 89 

the day's inanition by a hearty supper of Yarmouth 
bloaters, Scotch marmalade, toasted pilot-bread, 
canned beef, and English breakfast tea. There was a 
dreamy quiet over the whole twilight landscape, and 
I sat in it smoking my pipe, with a sense of perfect 
rest, only broken by my appreciation of the anxiety 
which would be felt for me by my party. 

I had finished my pipe, and sat chatting with one 
of the party, when another member came from the 
tent with a troubled face, and asked me if I knew 
anything about medicine. 

" Too much," I replied : " who is sick of it now ?" 

" Mr. has just been attacked with terrible 

distress in the epigastrium. He is suffering from 
wretched cramps, and I don't know but he may be 
in serious danger." 

I saw that his trouble was only one of our ordinary 
Western summer affairs, and, knowing that it would 
presently cure itself, set to work to relieve the imme- 
diate pain. I had one of the servants build a roaring 
fire, and set on it a camp-kettle full of water. In 
about five minutes this was scalding hot, and I kept 
a steady express-train of towels, freshly wrung out of 
it, running between it and the epigastric station re- 
ferred to. 

This treatment was an instantaneous success in 
more senses than one. It not only quieted the pa- 
tient's pain, but brought relief to the anxiety of his 
friends. When the bright fire I had made leapt up 
into the dark, it became a beacon to two despondent 
horsemen, who were searching vainly for me on the 
southern bluff. They immediately pushed for it ; and 
nearly an hour after the first towel had started from 
the kettle. Hunger and John Gilbert appeared at the 



90 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

further bank of the river, and shouted, " Halloo ! " I 
left my patient sinking into a pleasant sleep, and dis- 
closed to them myself and my safety, after which I 
had the pleasure of piloting them round the slough 
by the same path which had led me to camp. 

They were as glad to see me as I to see them. I 
found that they had been in search of me for three 
hours, having returned from their hunt to dinner, and 
started out again to look me up soon after that. I in- 
troduced them to my new friends, got them supper, 
and then we all camped down under our blankets 
(my friends had thoughtfully brought mine out to 
me), to await the daylight that should enable us to 
return. 

The impression in our own camp had been that I was 
killed or horribly mangled by some old bull, whom I 
had brought to bay. Such things happen every sea- 
son ; and the fact that Nig was famous for his pluck in 
riding up to the very head of the buffalo whom his 
master had wounded, did not diminish the fear of my 
friends in my behalf 

I further found that I had been within a mile of 
our camp, when I struck the high bluff where I found 
the deserted Indian camp. I learned a new fact about 
the bluffs of the Republican. They do not run par- 
allel with the river, but alternately recede and ap- 
proach, making the river bottom a succession of am- 
phitheatres, the ends of whose semicircles rise precip- 
itously from the water, like the bluff in question. Had 
I known this fact, I should not have been misled by 
the conformation of the land. The very next amphi- 
theatrical bottom below the Indian bluff was the one 
on which our party lay encamped. 

This had been a day of curious good fortune to me, 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 91 

though I regretted to think that it all arose from 
some corresponding misfortune on the part of my 
British friends. If they had not diverged from their 
course on the northern divide, I should have crossed 
the river to-night, only to change my place of deso- 
lation ; there would have been no British flag here to 
gladden an American eye. If my friend had not been 
attacked in the epigastrium, I should have built no 
fire. Had I built none, my comrades would have 
turned back to camp in despair. They had just con- 
cluded to do so, when my beacon flamed up through 
the dark. I thought of these things with a tendency 
to philosophize, but Zeno himself would have gone to 
sleep after such a day as I had spent. In five min- 
utes, thoughtless and philosophers, we were all " saw- 
ing gourds " together in the land of Nod. 

The sun was not half an hour high when our blan- 
kets were strapped behind our saddles, and we our- 
selves had shaken hands with our kind hosts. We 
had gone as far as Turkey Draw, a wet ravine about 
four miles from the English camp (and very well 
named, as the rapid departure from their nests of 
several turkey-hens at our approach convinced us), 
when we caught sight of two fine bufialo on the broad 
meadow, bordering the opposite side of the draw. I 
felt glad of an opportunity for retrieving myself, and 
bringing a little meat home to camp, after my long 
absence. So I stole quietly across the stream into 
its fringing timber, and, dismounting from Nig, took 
steady aim at the nearest buffalo. He was grazing 
with his haunches toward me. The ball broke his 
right hip, and he plunged away on three legs, the 
other swinging useless. I leapt on my horse, put spurs 
to him, and was in three minutes close on the bull's 



92 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

rear. To my astonishment, and the still greater sur- 
prise of the two old hunters who came after me, the 
unhurt bull stuck to his comrade's side without flinch- 
ing. I fired another shot, which took effect in the 
lungs of the first buffalo ; the second sheered off for a 
moment, but instantly returned to his friend. The 
wounded buffalo became distressed, and slackened his 
pace ; the unwounded one not only retarded his, but 
actually stopped, came to the rear of his friend, and 
stood with his head down, offering battle ! This was 
the first instance of such fidelity known to Hunger, 
John Gilbert, or any old hunter to whom I have re- 
lated it. 

The buffalo bull, in pairing season, will forsake his 
wounded cow ; the cow will not stand a moment to 
protect her hurt calf; yet here was a devotion which 
had no instinct to inspire it, an ideal camaraderie rare 
even among men. The sight was to all three of us a 
sublime one. We could no more have , accepted the 
challenge of this brave creature than we could have 
smitten Damon at the side of Pythias. Epic bull ! 
Bull worthier of heroic bronzes than half the man- 
made heroes who prance in brass on public squares ! 
I had once in college a bosom friend like thee. How 
strangely the grotesque intertwines with our life's 
dearest things, and becomes transfigured above laugh- 
ter, when those things are consecrated of death ! My 
friend was called, in the rude style of man's endear- 
ment, "Our little Buffalo Bull," — for he was strong, 
vital, impetuous, and came from the Lake City of New 
York State, which gave him the former half of his 
soubriquet. If that man were by my side in peril, 
brave bull, he would stick by his friend to the death, 
as thou by thine. But he fell at Seven Pines, in the 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 93 

front of his regiment, with a ball through the bravest 
forehead that ever faced friend or foe. Go, noble bull ! 
I cannot shoot ! I wish I had not slain thy brother ! 

The wounded buffalo ran on to the border of the 
next wet draw, troubling us httle to keep up with 
him, and in attempting to cross fell headlong down 
the steep, oozy bank, and never rose again. Not till 
that moment, when courage was useless forever, did 
faithful Achates drop from the side of his ^Eneas, and 
consider his own safety in flight. We took off our 
hats to him as he walked sullenly away, and gave 
three cordial cheers to his departing form as it van- 
ished beyond the fringing timber. 

Having cut off the hump and the tongue of our 
game, we continued our way to camp, reaching it after 
about four miles' further travel. Persons desiring to 
know how I was received, will please consult " The 
Lost Heir," T. Hood author. Next to having thought 
your friend dead, and found out you were correct, 
there is nothing more disagreeable than to think so 
and find it a mistake. " So much good tears lost," as 
Talfourd said of a lady who cried all the way through 
Mrs. Siddons' "Rosalind," supposing it to be her Lady 
Constance. However, my recent misadventure re- 
sulted well, in having convinced us all of the propri- 
ety of a compact never hereafter to stray away from 
our own party on the Plains. 

When I had received the full measure due me of 
felicitation and scolding, the horses which, just as I 
arrived, had been put under saddle with the intention 
of going out to look up Hunger and John Gilbert, as 
well as myself, were brought back to their original 
positions, and, breaking up camp, we all set out for 
a meadow five miles further down the Republican, on 



94 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the same side. Our prevailing motive was to gratify 
Thompson's inextinguishable enthusiasm for cows. If 
he had been Juno's cestrum, poor lo would have fared 
even more pitiably than the poets tell us. Thompson 
was a capital fellow and shot ; but if I were called on 
in a court of justice to testify what I regarded the 
salient point of his character, candor would force me 
to confess "cows." Despite the failures of yesterday, 
he was as certain that a promised land of cows was 
flowing with milk and calves just beyond the far tim- 
ber as if he had been permitted to stand where Moses 
stood, and view the landscape o'er. It was impossi- 
ble not to catch the infection of such certainty. To 
be sure, I had seen the main herd in a diametrically 
opposite direction, and all the stampeded detachments 
fled that way ; but how so much conviction could be 
based on an entire absence of cow was a psychological 
problem we felt inadequate to solve. So we blithely 
set forth with Thompson, a boo-scopic fervor gleam- 
ing from every eye. 

Our way led along the first bottom through a broad 
dry slash of last year's grass, yellow as a wheat-field. 
We occasionally sent a turkey-hen rattling from her 
nest, as we approached a timbered draw, and saw an 
antelope or two, but no fresh buffalo-sign appeared, 
or anything else of striking interest. An hour's ride 
brought us to one of the forward-curving extremi- 
ties of the high bluff*, and we were compelled to ford 
the river to the low bottom on the other side. We 
had great difficulty in getting our wagons across. 
The middle of the most practicable ford we could 
find, proved to have as treacherous a quicksand bot- 
tom as one ever sees. Our horses fell, and were only 
kept from drowning by the most vigorous efforts to 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 95 

keep their noses perpendicular. Our wagons sank so 
rapidly, that, to save their tires from following their 
hubs out of sight, we were all compelled to strip our- 
selves, plunge in, unload them, and carry their con- 
tents to the shore. The water rose over the bottom- 
boards, and there stopped as we got the last box of 
hard-tack safe to land. We then hitched our saddle 
horses, which with the buggy had crossed safely, by 
extempore breast-straps and their picket-ropes, to the 
tugs of our struggling wagon-teams, and managed to 
unslough them just in time. 

The sun was as bright, the sky as clear, as yester- 
day, and all the party, more especially myself, with 
a red-hot pincushion for a hand, were greatly fa- 
tigued and perspired. Halting our horses to rest un- 
der the shade of some fine old cotton-woods between 
the river and the open, we plunged back into the Re- 
publican, and sucked refreshment through every pore, 
during a bath which lasted nearly an hour. Over and 
above this delightful relief, our swim had some inter- 
esting scientific results, which I transfer almost verba- 
tim from the hurried pages of my field-book, apologiz- 
ing for any deficiency which may be found in definite- 
ness of nomenclature, by the fact that in such circum- 
stances as ours an amateur scientist has neither books 
nor tests, except his own memory and intuitions. 

1. Along the river banks, and in holes of its bed, 
we found several strong chalybeate springs, with bog- 
iron about their spiracles. Everywhere we discovered 
iron ore of some kind in immediate proximity to the 
water. Much of it was peroxide mixed into a yellow 
mass with clay; but we found some specimens of 
black-scale that were almost virgiif-pure, — certainly, 
I should say, reaching ninety per cent, of metal. It 



96 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

appeared in large enough quantities to make its work- 
ing indubitably valuable, when the Pacific Railroad 
shall have given an outlet to the products of the 
Plains. 

2. We found, both above and under water, slate in 
every stage of its formation, from the soft layer of clay, 
newly compacted into a slab, to the hardest kind of 
uncrystalline shale. When we dug down and brought 
up masses of the river bottom, they were laminated 
in parallel bands of varying color, which showed us 
plainly, as if written in characters of light, the succes- 
sive periods of changing detritus brought down by 
the stream. Some of the masses cracked across with 
a true slaty fracture, square and straight, breaking 
under slight pressure. Some bent like fresh clay. All 
laminated easily. A large number of specimens con- 
tained shells ; some of the older masses had them 
fossilized ; and in none did they belong to any species 
whose living representatives we could find along the 
stream. Most of them were acephalous, — allied to 
the clam ; some of them had corrugated valves ; one 
or two, the cardinal expansion of the scallop. Several 
were ostracidce. One particularly hard lump of clay- 
rock, which laminated with comparative difficulty, 
was a perfect congeries of gasteropod univalves, both 
fossil shell and cast remaining perfect. What sur- 
prised me most was to find slate containing these 
obsolete shells, so soft and so inchoate in its own petri- 
faction ; also to find such abundance of perfect fossils 
in clay -shale at all. All geologists know that through- 
out our Eastern region this friable rock is the poorest 
possible receptacle for the preservation of remains. 
I ascribe the durability of the matrix in the present 
instance to a small per cent, of lime acting as a ce- 
ment. 



COMSTOCK'S. - A BUFFALO HUNT. 97 

3. Numerous flat plates of a yellow argillaceous 
limestone came up from the bed of the river, and 
were found in situ on its bank. These did not lami- 
nate, but broke across with as square a fracture as 
the slate. The lime was in combination, — probably 
an impure gypsum; but as to that, in the absence 
of chemical tests, I could only judge by a sulphurous 
taste and smell at the fracture. 

4. Everywhere in the river appeared a very re- 
markable conglomerate, and like the slate in exhib- 
iting all the stages of formation. The matrix was the 
blue clay of the bank, the rubble was the gravel of 
the bottom. It was most interesting to read the his- 
tory of its formation in the progressive specimens. 
A lump of heavy clay breaks off the shore, and is 
rolled over the pebbles of the bed by a rapid shallow 
current, which presently gives it a spherical, oval, or 
cylindrical contour, and studs it with a mass of small 
imbedded stones. As these sink deeper, the clay laps 
over them, and begins catching a new layer of pebbles 
on its fresh surface. Some less recent balls which we 
brought up from the bed were two feet in circumfer- 
ence, and little else than a mass of pebbles, cemented 
by hardened clay. Several were so compacted and 
indurated that the surface seemed nearly as homoge- 
neous as porphyry, the matrix having become little 
less hard than the flintiest pebbles. 

This sight staggered me in my own preconceived 
view, and that of many geologists, regarding the 
igneous origin of the harder conglomerates. From 
what I saw I could well conceive how the very hard- 
est might have been the result of mere water-opera- 
tions. I had regarded the pebbles of igneous origin, 
found in conglomerates, as presumptive proof of the 



98 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

same origin for the whole mass. But the pebbles in 
any conglomerate might easily have been the detritus 
rolled from hypogene rocks down the bed of a stream 
with tenacious clay banks like the Republican. This 
view opened to me a new .field of speculation upon 
the aqueous and igneous theories of many formations. 

5. The pebbles and breccia-like detritus which in- 
here in the above conglomerates, are exceedingly 
diversified. I found among other water- worn detritus, 
appearing in patches between the clay and quick- 
sand of the bottom, every possible kind of silicious 
material, such as agate, pure quartz crystal, smoky, 
rosy, and cloudy quartz, cornelian (impure), cellular 
quartz, and quartz united with feldspar and horn- 
blende, or both, in all proportions and manners. One 
specimen of the cellular kind, associated with fibrous 
hornblende, was peculiarly beautiful, and resembled 
some of the rich auriferous specimens which I after- 
ward found in the Colorado mines (Gregory and Bob- 
tail lodes). All these minerals I regard as brought 
down by the ice and current from the head of the Re- 
publican, which, despite the United States Survey 
maps, is in all probability to be found as far west as 
Denver, and thirty miles south. They are all of Rocky 
Mountain formations, and resemble no outcrop in the 
region where I found them. 

6. To a similar source may be ascribed the small 
particles of mica discovered in the ferruginous sand 
of the bed. In my field-book I wrote "must" instead 
of "may," but after discoveries made it necessary for 
me to suspend a decision. When I reached Fort 
Kearney, Lieutenant Davis, then garrison command- 
ant, showed me a specimen of mica which he had 
found, with many others Hke it, in clay beds on the 



COMSTOCK'S.— A BUFFALO HUNT. 99 

Republican, about twenty miles above our second ford. 
I could not gather from his description as to whether 
it lay apparently in situ or washed in with other debris. 
If the former be the true case, it opens the same in- 
teresting question regarding the aqueous or igneous 
origin of mica, which a little above was started about 
the conglomerate. If the formation of mica can be 
gradual and aqueous, like that of clay shale, Lieuten- 
ant Davis' specimen would be an excellent illustration 
of the mineral in its earlier stages. It was so soft 
that, although in a tabular prism and nearly quite 
transparent, I could scratch it almost as easily as 
putty, and scrape its edges into powder with my nail, 
and without scaling off the laminae. At first sight it 
appeared like calc-spar, and not till it refused to effer- 
vesce with acids did it occur to me to try its cleav- 
age, when it laminated with ease to an indefinite 
thinness, each sheet showing a perfect micaceous iri- 
descence on the surface. 

7. I also found an immense boulder of almost pure 
feldspar, the largest mass not distinctly crystalline 
that I have ever seen. It was as hard as iron, of a 
nearly similar weight, and about three feet in circum- 
ference. 

8. Near our first ford I found a small outcrop of 
impure shaly-brown coal, of no apparent commercial 
value. Butler told me that he had seen an outcrop- 
ping seam of coal on the Little Blue Bluffs back of 
the ranch. I had no time to go and examine it, — can- 
not therefore be certain that it is true coal, — but am 
inclined to believe both this and the Republican out- 
crop of the same period as contemporary with much 
which I afterward found near Denver, and which was 
indubitably tertiary. Of that we shall speak further. 



100 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

From, our ford we moved down along the north 
bank to the intersection of the Fort Riley and Fort 
Kearney trail with the Republican first bottom. In 
some places the track was so overgrown with grass 
that it needed John Gilbert's eyes to find it, and con- 
siderable imagination to conceive how it could have 
been but a few years ago a comparatively important 
route from the Kaw to the Rocky Mountains. At this 
point a decayed old bridge of logs overhung a small 
stream emptying into the Republican, and just above 
it the beaver dams were plentier and more interest- 
ing than we anywhere saw them during our journey. 
We here halted for dinner; and Thompson's cows not 
having yet turned up with any fresh steak, we were 
compelled to feed on canned provisions. These dis- 
posed of, Munger, the artist, and myself continued in 
the buggy along a beautifully smooth, grassy bottom, 
with gigantic cotton-woods fringing the river all the 
way, to a point about a mile above the junction of 
White Rock Creek with the Republican. Here we 
picketed our horses, and prepared to camp down, 
building a magnificent fire of old logs, with a hollow 
cotton-wood for a chimney. Thompson finally ap- 
peared to tell us that the others had got tired, and 
were camping four miles above, also to ask if we had 
seen any cows. We all the more regretted to say that 
we had not, inasmuch as the wagons contained our 
whole commissariat, and we were hungry enough to 
have done anything for a supper except reharness 
and ride back four miles after we had camped down 
for the night. Thompson returned to the base of 
supplies, and we went to bed supperless. Substance 
being denied us, we were fain to content ourselves 
with shadows. Our feet lay toward the river bank, and 



COMSTOCK'S. — A BUFFALO HUNT. 101 

our magnificent, though purely ornamental fire made 
the gigantic white trunks and grotesque gnarled 
branches of the cotton-woods overhanging the stream 
dance and flicker like ghosts in a dream. I think this 
was one of the noblest chiaro-oscuro effects of fire-light 
that I ever saw in my life. Below us murmured the 
river, repeating the sky's purple twilight on its smooth 
depths, and glinting with diamond sparks from our 
flame on its fretful shallows. The air was the perfec- 
tion of breathableness, — softer, purer, clearer than 
anything east of the plains around Mount Shasta. 

The next morning we rejoined our companions just 
in time to cook our breakfast on the remains of their 
kitchen. I began to feel terribly sick of meat, and, 
in my rage for vegetables, broke my bowie-knife dig- 
ging wild onions. After this exploit, costing me a 
splendid weapon irreplaceable short of Denver, we 
made a ragout of onions and salt pork, which I can- 
not recommend to anybody living near Delmonico's, 
washed our dishes in the Republican, and turned 
north again toward the ranch. 

We reached Comstock's about two in the afternoon, 
with less buffalo-meat than we should have liked, but 
an experience of one of the loveliest and most inter- 
esting regions on the Continent; a region which the 
Pacific Railroad will make the most valuable farming- 
land between St. Louis and California. 



CHAPTER ni. 

FROM THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 

On the 29th of May, our party were obliged to 
divide. We had waited several nights without find- 
ing a westward stage which would contain us all. 
Accordingly two of us stayed behind, while our two 
friends squeezed themselves into an overcrowded 
coach, where one at least of the passengers took it 
as a personal insult, using language unparliamentary 
and profane. Hunger had promised to send us on 
an empty coach from Atchison, during the next few 
days ; for this our friends were to telegraph when 
they reached Kearney. 

I was not sorry to stay with the Comstocks a lit- 
tle longer. We were both of us charmed with their 
original and kindly characters, and they never tired 
of hearing us talk about the great East. Apropos 
of that, John Gilbert told me that next year he was 
going east on a visit. I gave him a cordial invitation 
to come and see me, when he replied naively, " I 
don't think I shall get beyond Chicago." What a 
revelation ! How far west must we be, when going 
to Chicago was going east ! And yet we were only 
two hundred miles on a road numbering more than 
as many thousands. 

From the Comstocks we learned more of the social 
condition of Kansas and Nebraska than all editorials 
and speeches had ever taught us at the East. To a 




lEAX BAPTISTE MONOUEVIE. See page 104. 




l'(,n!Tl!AlT OK cnMSTOCK. See page 24 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 103 

remarkable extent this family had kept the good of 
frontier life, and shed aside the evil. I regarded 
them as in all respects trustworthy and unbiased 
historians of the events of the last few years ; yet 
they revealed to me a condition of affairs which was 
appalling. Nobody could suspect them of a bias 
toward the accursed system which had originally 
caused all the border troubles ; so I was obliged to 
beheve them when they said that bushwhacking, 
robbery, murder, jayhawking in general, had been 
committed under the sacred name of Liberty and the 
detested name of Slavery alike. Border Ruffianism 
had spread far beyond its original clique. In every 
small settlement or settled region, the party in power 
for the time had called to its aid all the means of vi- 
olence which coerced the first Free State men. If a 
settler did not lend himself to the tyranny in vogue, 
he was marked for plunder or destruction. Armed 
parties surrounded his house in the night, brought 
him out and shot or hanged him, confiscated his 
goods, drove off his cattle, and sent his family into 
the bush. This was done in the name of the cause 
most popular at the time, and for much of it no 
cause was responsible. It was mere organized pillage 
under a convenient party name, and got so lucrative 
that jayhawking absorbed into its profession all the 
bold, unscrupulous spirits who spurned the slow re- 
wards of industry; and it became as dangerous for a 
hard-working bond fide settler to become a "suspect," 
as honest people found it in the French Reign of Ter- 
ror. The Comstocks had seen men in whose loyalty 
to the Union and freedom they had as much confi- 
dence as in their own, utterly broken up and ruined 
by jay hawkers, pretending to represent those holy 



104 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

interests ; they had sheltered from the halter and the 
pistol hunted acquaintances, whose only crime was 
the possession of property which the jayhawkers 
found valuable. 

For the last three days of our stay at Comstock's, 
a very interesting man was visiting there. Jean 
Baptiste Moncrevie, the Indian interpreter, is sixty- 
eight years of age, yet looks scarcely over fifty ; full 
of French grace, fire, and vivacity, grafted with 
American humor. He was educated in Paris, mar- 
ried, came over to this country to make his way in 
one of the professions, lost his wife in her first child- 
bed, and became insane. He recovered his sanity 
. after a protracted period, but the energy of his life 
was gone. He had no further ambition ; the thought 
of succeeding in the world was a mockery to a man 
who had lost the world's highest success. To get 
away from old associations, he went "West with Audu- 
bon, and became so well acquainted with frontier life 
that at the close of the ornithological tour he deter- 
mined to stay among the Indians. He is now per- 
fectly conversant with six different Indian languages, 
— the Sioux, Pawnee, Arapahoe, Blackfeet, Crow, and 
Flathead. He furnished me with some vocabularies, 
valuable not only in the practical, but the philolog- 
ical point of view. All the material which we pro- 
cured in this specialty, during our entire tour, we 
forwarded to Mr. George Gibbs, of the Smithsonian, 
whose book on the Indian languages must only be 
worthy of the opportunities he has enjoyed, and the 
erudition he possesses, to be the most complete dic- 
tionary, grammar, and comparative philology of sav- 
age speech ever issued in any country. Moncrevie's 
stories amused us much. I never heard a man de- 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 105 

scribe an Indian " soldier-feast " as comically as he 
did. For the benefit of the uninitiated, let me say 
that this happy banquet consists of a series of the 
most frightful messes which ever entered a witch 
cauldron. For instance, there will be a ragout of 
dog, flavored with mud and sole-leather ; a soup of 
lizards, pig-gristle, and wild onions ; an enormous 
salmis of old mule and sunflower leaves. Your host 
is most generous with his provender. He heaps 
your plate with the nauseous delicacies until you sit 
aghast. If you cannot eat your portion, you are 
technically said to be " killed," and have to buy some 
other convive to eat it for you with a valuable pres- 
ent. One elastic Indian of long practice will some- 
times eat two other men's portions beside his own, 
and feel no more inconvenience from them than an 
anaconda from a goat au naturel. Moncrevie had 
once to pay the most valuable horse he had, to get 
his mess eaten by a Sioux brave. As these are debts 
of honor, the most capacious glutton goes to a sol- 
dier-feast with all the avidity felt by a gray Wall 
Street bull for a "corner " in Harlem. 

Nowhere on our travels did we find better oppor- 
tunities for studying Western tree-formations than 
along the banks of the Little Blue. The varied 
structure of the cotton-woods was a perpetual sur- 
prise to us. They seem by their heart-shaped leaf 
to be near relations of the poplar family; but they 
have none of that tribe's stifle, unyielding individ- 
uality. The poplar, especially the Lombardy, is the 
Mr. Dombey of our sylva, but there is nothing of 
the starched-shirt-collar school in the attitudes or ex- 
pressions of the cotton-woods. They are protean in 
their simulations. One whose butt we used for our 



106 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

rifle-target, about forty rods from Comstock's door, 
passed for a magnificent white-oak until we got near 
enough to examine its foliage ; and everywhere in the 
neighborhood these mimetic trees wore the mien of 
the elm, the ash, or the hickory. Nature on the 
Plains, like the poet Saadi, has but a limited vocab- 
ulary, yet makes a wonderfully polytoned music 
with her scant material. 

It was about eleven o'clock on the night of May 
30th, that we broke away from the cordial grasp of 
our friends and entertainers, to resume our places in 
the Overland Coach. To give some idea of the cheap- 
ness of board and the generosity of soul existing in 
the Comstock ranch, I will chronicle that our bill 
amounted to twenty-five cents a meal for the days 
spent in-doors, nothing at all for our lodging, as lit- 
tle for the share of transportation and edibles which 
we had enjoyed during our hunt ; and that for the 
days elapsing between our return from the Repub- 
lican and our resumption of the road, we could only 
obtain the privilege of squaring our account by de- 
positing the debt as a concealed keepsake in Frank's 
and Mary's hands, and running away before they dis- 
covered what it was. 

"We were fortunate enough to find our favorite 
box-seats unoccupied, and mounted to them with 
great satisfaction, thus avoiding the dreadful grudge 
which is created in the minds of a stageful of in- 
sides, by new-comers entering at an inhuman hour, 
with a proposition to re-sort their heads and legs. 

For the first forty miles our road lay along the 
Little Blue. The light-and-shade effects on its dense 
Mnge of foliage, and occasional glimpses of its glid- 
ing water, were well worthy of an artist's enthusiasm. 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 107 

Every turn of the road brought us into some new 
loveliness : some deep embowered dell, scented with 
the ethereal spice of the wild grape-vine ; some lofty 
bluff leaving us just space to pass by a dug-way be- 
tween it and the river (one such place, called the 
Narrows, awakens some anxiety in the breasts of 
travellers who have not been case-hardened to dan- 
ger farther west) ; some broad stretch of rolling plain, 
where the distances were vague and mystical, — and 
ours was the only living spot in the great solitude. 

Our first driver told us that Hunger, on his way 
back to Atchison from the ranch, had run down, 
with his buggy, drawn by Nig and Ben, a pair of 
young antelope kids a fortnight old, captured them, 
and carried them home with him in triumph ! That 
was indeed a buggy superior to its birth. What tales 
it will have to relate, when it finally gets invalided 
among the veteran stage-coaches in that Chelsea of 
vehicles, a wagon-shed ! how their venerable doors 
will open with astonishment at a buggy that has 
hunted buffalo and captured antelope ! 

During the night we accomplished three stations. 
Little Blue, Liberty Farm, and Lone Tree. We rode 
at the average Overland Stage rate of a little over 
one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Our second 
driver was a fine-looking young fellow who interested 
us much. A year before, he had been at the very bot- 
tom of the pit of drunkenness,— as apparently hopeless 
a case as existed on the road. From that horror his 
good angel had brought him up once more to his per- 
fect manhood ; and now he refused the proffer of liquor 
from one of the passengers, with an earnest " no ! 
no, I thank you," which only seemed brusque to those 
who did not know his history, and contained in it the 



108 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

significance of a whole youth of misery. Many times 
afterward, on stage-boxes between Nebraska and Cal- 
ifornia, I thought of that handsome young face, hop- 
ing to Heaven that its frank brown eyes might be 
beclouded by death before liquor should redim them. 
He impressed me as a soul whose inhabiting devil 
would be no common fiend. His face was so writ- 
ten with the possibilities of extreme feeling that it 
haunted one like Guido's "Beatrice." 

It grew light enough, before we reached the break- 
fast station at Thirty-two Mile Creek, for us to see at 
wide distances apart several ranch houses and corrals, 
one at least of which was steadily inhabited. This 
appeared at our crossing of Pawnee Creek, a shallow 
affluent of the Blue. Here, too, we found real pathos 
in the sight of a rudely inclosed little grave-yard, 
containing one large and one small headstone. Even 
in this loneliness a man might be left still more alone ! 

The country in general was as uninhabited as we 
saw it about Comstock's. Antelope abounded on all 
sides, scouring out of sight from within easy rifle-shot 
at every turn of our road. The day before, a hunter 
had shot an elk on the river bottom, but a few miles 
from Thirty-two Mile Creek, so large that he had to 
return to his camp, and send back a wagon for him. 

The journey from Thirty-two Mile Creek to Fort 
Kearney (a distance of thirty-five miles) disclosed to 
us increasing barrenness in the soil, accompanied by 
a corresponding change in the zone of the flora. Cac- 
tuses became a prominent feature on all the hot sand 
dunes ; a peculiar desert species of the Asclepias here 
and there began showing itself; and wherever the 
arid ground yielded any herbage, the succulent grass 
of the Little Blue region was replaced by the short, 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 109 

wiry gramma. This little plant is the main support 
of the herds along the Platte. Both the emigrant 
cattle and the buffaloes are very fond of it, though 
their attachment seems rather eccentric to anybody 
who has ever examined it. If you can imagine an 
inventive genius who had discovered a method of 
making an article for army rations, called " Desiccated 
Corkscrews," his products would be an approximate 
imitation of the gramma. If I ever felt like decrying 
that intolerable old fallacy to the effect that figures 
don't lie, it was when I heard a ranchman mention 
the avoirdupois of an ox who had fed on gramma en- 
tirely. How it can be nutritive, needs chemistry to 
show ; that it is so, all the plainsmen aver, and their 
cattle seem to prove it. 

The ground rose perceptibly between breakfast and 
Fort Kearney. We climbed several of the loftiest 
and longest hills we had seen since leaving St. Louis. 
About twenty miles east of the fort, we seemed to 
reach the top of a new terrace, and thenceforward 
rode nearly all the way on a level sand-plain, ex- 
tremely barren, very hot and dusty, and quite distress- 
ing to the horses. This plain was interspersed with 
bare sand-hillocks from five to twenty feet high, mak- 
ing it look as if it were the now abandoned dumping- 
ground of some pre-Adamic race of genii, who fol- 
lowed the dustman's trade for the rest of the solar 
system, and came to this world to unload. Beyond 
the hillocks, perhaps a distance of eight miles south- 
erly, rose a much higher range of equally barren 
bluffs, giving us, for the first time in our journey, a 
sensation of mountain scenery, and, so to speak, strik- 
ing the resolving chords between the low plains of 
Kansas and the high plateaus of the Rocky Mountain 



110 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

region, whither we were tending. On our northern 
hand, about fifteen miles from the fort, we saw for 
the first time bounding our horizon the fringe of trees 
along the Platte. At first sight this river appeared 
as wide as the Hudson at Tappan Zee, or the St. John's 
below Pilatka. Its further banks were enveloped in 
a misty veil, and looked languidly soft, like far islands 
seen through tropical fog. Atmospheric distance 
never deceived so completely. The charming gran- 
deur and tenderness of scale on which this view 
seemed constructed, were delusions of the mirage. 
Hot sun and mirroring sand had wrought up the 
scanty materials of the stream into a dream of beauty 
which had no geometric reasons. Our best dreams of 
beauty are generally of that sort, belonging to the 
soul, and not to the intellect. We hated to have this 
vision disturbed by Gradgrind measurements of space. 
" If this were a delusion, let us dream on ! " I must 
confess that this region of mirage is almost the only 
place, till one reaches the Platte's ice-cold canon, in 
the mountains of Colorado, where the river exerts 
any fascination on the tourist. It will presently lose 
the assistance of mirage and imagination, and turn out 
the most miserably uninteresting and feeble-minded 
stream to be found on the continent. If it were com- 
pressed into a single bed, instead of being vaguely 
dispersed about great and small islands, in all sorts 
of intricate channels, it would approach the size of 
the Oswego River at the city of that name. 

About two o'clock, we passed a very picturesque 
party of Germans going to Oregon. They had a large 
herd of cattle and fifty wagons, mostly drawn by oxen, 
though some of the more prosperous " outfits " were 
attached to horses or mules. The people themselves 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. Ill 

represented the better class of Prussian or North Ger- 
man peasantry. A number of strapping teamsters, in 
gay costumes, appeared like Westphalians. Some of 
them wore canary shirts and blue pantaloons ; with 
these were intermingled blouses of claret, rich warm 
brown, and the most vivid red. All the women and 
children had some positive color about them, if it only 
amounted to a knot of ribbons, or the glimpse of a 
petticoat. I never saw so many bright and comely 
faces in an emigrant train. One real little beauty, 
who showed the typical German blonde through all 
her tan, peered out of one great canvas wagon cover, 
like a baby under the bonnet of the Shaker giantess, 
and coqueted for a moment with us from a pair of 
wicked-innocent blue eyes, drawing back, when the 
driver stared at her, in nicely simulated confusion. 
Several old women, of less than the usual anile hid- 
eousness of the German Bauerinn, were trudging 
along the road with the teamsters, in short blue pet- 
ticoats and everlasting shoes; partly to unbend their 
joints, as was evident from the pastime alacrity of 
their gait, and partly to oversee a crowd of children 
who were hunting green grass with sickles, and con- 
veying their scanty harvest to the cattle by handfuls 
at a time. In the wagons all manner of domestic 
bliss was going on. A young teamster, whose turn it 
was to ride, sat smoking a pipe and wooing his bashful 
dear, thus uniting business and pleasure in an emi- 
nent degree, under the shadow of a great wagon 
top, and on a barrel of mess pork. Many mothers 
were on front seats, nursing their babies in the inno- 
cent unconsciousness of Eve. Old men lay asleep 
on bales of bedding, with their horn spectacles still 
astride the nose ; old women, with similar aids, read 



112 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

great books of theoretical religion, or knitted stock- 
ings of the practical kind. Every wagon was a gem 
of an interior such as no Fleming ever put on can- 
vas, and every group a genre piece for Boughton. 
The whole picture of the train was such a delight in 
form, color, and spirit that I could have lingered near 
it all the way to Kearney. 

About three o'clock we arrived at Fort Kearney, 
and again halted. The comparatively light-loaded 
stage which Hunger had kindly promised to send on 
to us, would arrive the next day. After dinner at the 
Overland station, we walked over to the fort, which 
is a mere inclosure of boards, containing several bar- 
rack buildings, and stores belonging to the trading- 
post. It is not intended to resist assault, but would 
probably furnish sufficient protection to settlers who 
might flee to it for asylum, from the Indian mode of 
warfare. 

Lieutenant Davis, then in command of a garrison 
of about a hundred Colorado troops, received us very 
politely, and asked us to make the fort our head-quar- 
ters. In the yard of his house we found a pair of 
nice little buffalo calves, which his men had captured 
in their last expedition against the Sioux. "With the 
engravings before us, it is needless to remark how 
strong is their resemblance to the calf of our domes- 
tic cow, at the same age. These are supposed to be 
about a month old. Our artist held two seances with 
the little creatures on the afternoon of our arrival 
and the next morning, transferring them to canvas in 
every variety of attitude, and getting their a?itmus 
and typical distinctions as well by heart as he had 
succeeded in doing with their belligerent sires. They 
are stupid little creatures, with the usual vituline 




Ii|ii|fli|i||||i I *i V (| " 11 ' 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 113 

concentration of sense in their mouths and noses, and 
no very clear idea of the system on which their legs 
were planned ; but they have a slight suggestion of 
their future hump, and a certain spunkiness of de- 
meanor, which, to the close observer, bound them off 
from the common calf Their coats, too, are rougher 
than his, and show symptoms of coming curl ; but 
they are of a reddish-brown color, which is not un- 
common in our barn-yards. 

Punctually at the expected time, our stage came 
along, and, to our great satisfaction, contained only a 
couple of passengers. Our dreams of luxurious space 
were rudely disturbed by the appearance, while we 
were dining, of the coach from Omaha, which here 
intersects the main Overland road, with a caro-o of 
passengers mostly intending to keep on further west, 
and clamorous for their shares in our vehicle. After 
protracted negotiation, we compromised by receiving 
two of the new lot, who, with our party of four and 
the original occupants, crowded us into wretchedly 
tight quarters. 

For the thirty-six miles to Plum Creek station, the 
road continued to run through a country of only less 
aridity than preceded our entrance to Fort Kearney. 
The only spots of brightness on the dreary waste of 
sand and gramma were the crimson flowers of the 
ground-poppy, which afford such diversified beauty 
to the Plains about the Little Blue, and which here 
fought for a bare existence with the thickening 
myriads of cacti, bursting up between the spikes 
and saffron -colored blossoms of the latter, like flames 
twinkling among pale cinders. 

Again we went pattering out into the twilight, be- 
hind fresh relays. About nine o'clock, the moon rose 



114 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

among a swarm of small straggling clouds. About 
eight miles from Plum Creek, her light fell on a broad 
encampment of Sioux, silvering the dingy skins and 
occasional canvas of the smoky U-fis into something 
like the Fenimore Cooper romance of Indian life. 
I could not help thinking that part of this illusion 
was owing to the early habits of the savage, which 
prevented any Indians from being in sight. It would 
take a good deal of moonlight to make an Indian look 
romantic. About the tents were a herd of pictur- 
esque, ewe-necked horses, feeding at their ease on the 
short, dry herbage, and showing their sides, mottled 
with the spots which characterize what we at the 
East call a " circus-horse," — still odder in the broad 
moonlight. 

Just as we passed the last tent, a strange figure 
burst through the narrow slit in it used as a doorway, 
and hailed our driver, who stopped for him, and took 
him on the box. He wore a handsome buckskin 
hunting-blouse, profusely embroidered and dangling 
with leather tags, a low slouch hat, and a beaded belt, 
from which peeped the butt of a six-shooter. His 
complexion was so bronzed, and his hair so long and 
black, that until I had looked him full in the face, and 
heard him speak, I took him for a Sioux. He was a 
white man, — or white as a man can be who has lived 
mu€h with the Indians of the Plains, — and had in 
his countenance one of the most singular mixtures 
of good-fellowship and desperadoism that I ever saw. 
I should have liked to see him on my side in a Plains 
fight, and been sorry to think he was on the other ; 
but there was an lago quality in his restless black 
eyes and the iciness of his laugh, which must have 
made any student of human nature uncomfortable 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 115 

in a protracted acquaintance with him among lonely 
surroundings. 

About eleven o'clock, when we were about half a 
mile from the station called Willow Island, the moon 
became as suddenly obscured as if she had been put 
out with an extinguisher. The clouds grew inky 
black, and simultaneously the wind rose to a tempest. 
I never saw in my life such dispatch in getting up a 
storm. Another minute, and the clouds were pelting 
down on us hailstones as large as musket-balls. The 
mules became frightened, and plunged furiously. It 
was too black to see the heads of the leaders, but 
there was nothing to be done except advance ; so by 
coaxing, cursing, and whipping, the driver finally 
persuaded the team to take us as far as the station. 
We jumped down from the box, and in the dark, after 
imminent danger from the hoofs of the madly kicking 
wheel-mules, managed to unhook the traces instead of 
cutting them, as we had contemplated the necessity 
of doing. It will seem almost incredible to anybody 
who has not seen a hailstorm on the Platte ; but after 
we had got the team loose, and were standing by their 
heads, while the inside passengers used up half a box 
of matches in getting the lanterns lighted, the stage 
heavy with mails, seven inside passengers, and all their 
baggage, was forcibly blown back by the wind a dis- 
tance of several yards. I could compare its effect on 
myself only to having a stable door pressed steadily 
against my person ; and if I had not held on by one 
of the most obstinate of nature's animals, I should 
have been sent scurrying out of sight in the direction 
of Fort Kearney. 

Just as our patience began to give out under the 
buffets of the wind and the sound whipping of the 



116 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

hail, our friend in the buckskin made his voice heard 
through the roar, and a stable-keeper appeared with 
a light, which was instantly put out. By this time 
our lanterns were lighted, and we managed to get 
our mules into their stalls without any accident more 
serious than a graze on one of the shins belonging to " 
our driver. 

It was quite out of reason to attempt going on 
in such a tempest. Accordingly we let our relays 
stay in the stable, and went back to tell the insides, 
penned into darkness and uncertainty by tightly but- 
toned carriage leathers, that we had concluded, after 
the manner of the Connecticut River mate, " to an- 
chor our end of the schooner." This seemed to meet 
as much approbation as they had to expend upon 
anything under the circumstances. They resigned 
themselves to an upright sleep against the straps and 
cushions, while we, who had still enough wakefulness 
in our legs to hunt up something better, betook our- 
selves to the stable, and lay down on clean straw in 
some empty stalls. I blessed the hailstorm which was 
pelting outside, for it had given me a chance to 
stretch myself. Dearest opportunity to the over- 
lander ! I have known hours when I speculated 
curiously on the torture of the rack, and wondered 
hpw the old martyrs could have found it so disagree- 
able. Certainly it seemed to me that any amount 
of relaxation could not be so painful as that sense of 
being shortened up, driven in, and clinched on the 
other side, which results from twenty-four hours' con- 
stancy to a bent position. I accordingly welcomed 
the chance of extending myself on the Willow Island 
straw, with a delight which would have scarcely been 
lessened, had the bare boards been substituted as a 
lying-place. 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 117 

About three o'clock in the morning I was awak- 
ened by a tumbling and groaning in the next stall 
to mine. I rose, and felt my way to the sufferer, 
thinking that he had a fit. In the dark I put out 
my hand, and touched a leathern fringe. It belonged 
to our new passenger. He continued to toss and 
twist; he got into deadly combat with the wisps of 
straw under him ; I heard him send home three or 
four well-meant blows with his fist against the side 
of the stall, and then he muttered in a voice of hor- 
ror, " Murder ! murder ! God, murder ! " 

I caught him by the shoulder, and shook him 
soundly. As he woke, he felt for his pistol. I held 
his hand, and explained the facts of the case. '• 
thank you ! " said he; "I sometimes have the night- 
mare very badly, and then I remember, — such disa- 
greeable things — everything in fact that I ever saw 
in my life." 

It was broad daylight when I woke the second 
time. My friend of the next stall had disappeared, 
and did not join us when we again put ourselves en 
route. The hail had ceased, but had left a gray, 
greasy, despondent heaven, and a sullen, sobbing 
wind. We rode through a sterile country, with 
distant bluffs of dun sand bounding our plain on 
either side, till at Midway Station we stopped for 
breakfast. 

One of the greatest puzzles of the Plains is their 
nomenclature. You stop at stations called something 
" Spring," and look in vain for anything to drink but 
stagnant water. When you come to anything " Lake," 
you are nearly sure to find no expanse a pig could wal- 
low in. If you discovered a station named Brown's, 
you might be very sure that no one had ever lived 



118 THE HEART OF THE COKTINENT. ' 

there but a family of Johnsons ; and there is no bet- 
ter Western reason for calling a station Pratt's Hill 
than because it is a hollow occupied by Joneses. 

We reached Cottonwood at dinner-time, but our 
previous experience gave us no encouragement to 
alight. We satisfied appetite with canned peaches, 
hard tack, and that charmingly portable little fish 
which so invariably accompanies Western immigra- 
tion that its empty tin coffins are seen scattered 
around every station door ; and the name for a spin- 
dling little fellow, whom the plainsman does not wish 
to compliment, is "You Sardine.'' 

The country around Cottonwood is more undulat- 
ing than any we had seen since leaving Comstock's. 
For miles both east and west of it, we continually 
climbed and descended hills, and passed through a 
series of sand canons, beginning to assume the typ- 
ical look of the mountain galleries further west. We 
observed projecting from the side of one of these, 
the first limestone outcrop we had noticed west of 
the Missouri River. 

Just west of Cottonwood, the Platte River is 
formed by the junction of its north and south forks. 
In the neighborhood of the confluence, the land be- 
gins rising westward perceptibly. About ten miles 
from Cottonwood, I got my first sensation of ascent 
toward the Rocky Mountains. There was a solid, 
under-braced look in the hills, a firm, resonant qual- 
ity to the road, which did not belong to alluvial 
bluffs. I felt as if I were standing on the first fold 
of the old fire-serpent, who ages ago wriggled him- 
self up under the crust, and protruded his flaming 
crest in the form of the Rocky Mountain summit. 
We continued passing over extensive undulations all 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 119 

that afternoon, though the harder formations made 
no visible outcrop. 

It was just after sunset when we ascended a con- 
siderable elevation to the station of Fremont Springs, 
29 miles west of Cottonwood and 379 from Atchison. 
We were now close beside the South Fork of Platte, 
and thenceforward to Denver, a distance of 274 miles, 
were hardly ever out of its sight. We stopped here 
to change horses, and take delicious draughts from 
the finest spring between the Missouri River and 
the Rocky Mountain snow-peaks. We found it care- 
fully enshrined, as if it were a Greek god ; for a 
clear, cold, living fountain may well demand apoth- 
eosis at the lips which have cooled their fever in it 
in the midst of the journey beside those stagnant 
pools and that dull, creeping, muddy river, which are 
the lot of every passenger across the Plains. The 
station-keeper was faithful to his precious trust ; and 
the crystal water was so well protected under a lit- 
tle house of boards, that neither sun could heat nor 
impurities sully a single ripple of its ceaseless gayety. 
It was like a baby's soul cradled in from the world's 
evil; a joy without reaction, an abandon without 
danger. It sang temperance lectures without know- 
ing it, inspired in its sleep. It was a homily on good 
living, a parable of pure-heartedness ; without didac- 
ticism going straight to the point. People with flat 
flasks in their breast-pockets felt disgusted at them, 
and, for miles after we left the spring, could not bear 
to take its taste out of their mouths. 

We bade adieu to the beautiful fountain and the 
little lakes into which it ran on its way to the Platte, 
all alive with wild ducks, and mirroring the exquisite 
pink and salmon hues of a beautiful sunset. We rode 



120 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

on twenty-five miles further, to Alkali Lake, where 
sleep so thoroughly overpowered me that instead of 
going into the station to take an Overland supper, I 
threw myself down on the stable straw, and slept a 
sleep like death, until the driver awakened me by 
protracted shaking. The sensation of having to get 
up and go on again, was one of the most miserable I 
ever knew. After all our experience, I could not 
learn the trick of sleeping upright ifi the stage. I 
kept on the box, and my whole nature fought slum- 
ber as if it were a disease. Nor did I ever learn ; and 
but for the necessity of the case summoning up all 
the Yankee ingenuity which was in me, I believe my 
comparatively uninitiated constitution would have 
given out before I got to Denver. 

I may say, in passing, that Alkali Lake was one of 
those places, now growing more frequent, where salts 
of soda and potash exist in nearly saturated solution 
with stagnant water, or occasional springs, in shallow 
basins along the banks of the Platte. The Platte it- 
self is not alkaline ; yet where the trail runs at any 
distance from it, emigrant cattle often suffer so much 
from thirst, that unless great watchfulness is used, 
they temporarily satiate themselves at the pools be- 
fore they can be driven to the river, producing a dis- 
ease of the stomach and intestines, which carries off 
multitudes of them every summer. The entire road 
along the South Fork is strewn with bleaching heads, 
whole skeletons, and putrefying carcasses, which mark 
the effects of this malady, heat, and overdriving. As 
for the human passenger, though in most cases his 
caution prevents him from an injurious gratification 
of his thirst, he still suffers intensely from the very 
inhalation of the air carrying alkaline particles. Few 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 121 

manias, it seems to me, were ever more intense than 
my longing for pickles, lemons, tamarinds, vinegar, 
anything which could correct the alkaline excess in 
my blood. The rest of us suffered nearly as much; 
and we found that the acid stores which we had used 
the precaution to bring from the Missouri River were, 
as long as they lasted, the most invaluable portion of 
our commissariat. At times I have ridden for twenty 
miles in a state of absolute wretchedness, with the taste 
of soda crusting my entire mouth and throat as per- 
ceptibly as if I had just taken a teaspoonful of the 
commercial article. To the traveller on this part 
of the Platte, canned fruit, the sourer the better, is 
an absolutely indispensable portion of his outfit. 

The use of that word " outfit," is curiously broad 
upon the Plains. It means as many things as the Ital- 
ian "roba," or the French "chose." It may seem a 
very natural amplification of significance that this 
term, originally taken from an emigrant's preparation 
for the road, should come to be applied to a suit of 
clothes, or even the ranch which a man had put 
under cultivation. But it is rather amusing to hear 
a Durham bull referred to as having rather a short 
outfit of horns ; a mother threatening a refractory 
child with the worst outfit he ever got in his life ; 
or a stage-driver saying that he has a big outfit of 
passengers. I was still more interested to have a 
man in Colorado tell me of a friend of his who had 
been living among the Indians, and had come home 
" with just the prettiest outfit of small-pox that he 
ever see." 

The moon rose late, and was Yory light. At any 
other time I might cheerfully have sat up with her. 
In my present state of feeling, I wondered how poets 



122 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

could ever have lingered out of bed long enough to 
write about her. A pumpkin cart full of moons, rein- 
forced by a Barnum's museum of nightingales, would 
not have been the least inducement to a man in my 
situation. We emerged from the hilly country we 
had been travelling since the middle of the afternoon, 
and came out upon a sterile-looking plain of sand and 
buffalo-grass, which resembled the country about Fort 
Kearney. It was after midnight when we reached 
Diamond Springs, a station four hundred and twenty- 
seven miles from Atchison, and another of the topo- 
graphical misnomers before referred to, possessing, so 
far as I could discover, as little that was valuable in 
the way of springs as of diamonds. 

It had, however, its uses to me. It meant bed. My 
mind was made up, that is to say, what mind I had 
left. It all rallied to the final support of my life's 
now one remaining idea. I jumped down from the 
box, stuck my head inside the leathers, and woke my 
friends from the miserable cat-nap they were indulg- 
ing, to bid them good-night till we met in Denver. 
They were too sleepy to be much surprised, and plead 
with great moderation for my continuance on the 
vehicle of torture. As for myself, I did not wait to 
see the horses change, but tumbled as well as I was 
able into the station-house, and was stretched on a 
bunk under my camp-blankets beside a sleeping sta- 
ble-keeper before the wheels rolled away. 

It was eight o'clock in the morning before I awoke. 
I think I never slept so much or of so excellent a 
quality in the same time. I was a new man when I 
stood on my feet, and the idea of breakfast began to 
dawn in on me like a dissolving view, replacing that 
of bed. 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 123 

After breakfast, which was made a little more lux- 
urious than the usual Overland meal by the addition 
of some very nice Indian meal flapjacks, I posted up 
my journal, and then went forth to survey the land. 
Trenck amused himself with spiders, and in " Le der- 
nier Jour d'un Condamne " much food for meditation 
existed within four stone walls. The human eye is a 
wonderfully adjustable instrument, becoming a tele- 
scope for broad generalizations, and a microscope for 
details. I brought mine to the latter focus, and went 
hunting for objects of interest over a tract which 
more perfectly represented Platitude and Inanity, re- 
duced to their geographical terms, than anything east 
of the Goshoot Desert. 

I dwell on this Thohu Va-vohu a little longer be- 
cause, if I can at all approach its painting in words, 
I shall have succeeded in conveying to my readers 
an idea of the sand and gramma plains skirting the 
South Platte, better than any which could be ren- 
dered by an engraving. 

I emerge from a one-story house of logs, fifty feet 
long, fifteen broad, twenty feet to the roof-peak. It 
has no pretense of a fence, but a corral about a hun- 
dred feet west incloses a barn and two company sta- 
bles. 

In front of me stretches a waste of sand, midway 
in color between an ash-heap and the Rockaway 
Beach, inimitably flat to the east and west, bounded 
on the southern horizon by a range of equally gloomy 
bluffs, which may be six miles off, and a hundred feet 
high. In all the view is no tree, no vegetation of any 
kind which a grown man would not have to stoop to 
touch, no living thing or sign of any ; for the very 
antelope, which usually put a locomotive spot of in- 



124 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

terest somewhere on such voids, had retired out of 
sight into the ravines of the bluff. Behind me, a 
hundred steps to the north, crept the Platte River, 
here apparently confined to a single channel about 
three hundred yards wide. It sneaks along between 
low banks, like an assassin river going to drown some- 
body. It does not woo or cajole ; it is a murderer 
who has lived past the arts of fascination ; a cruel 
courtesan, old, wrinkled, hateful, too life-weary to 
think of pleasing, yet loving to kill. And it has 
killed. It has proffered fords, and given quicksands ; 
it has engulfed in its treacherous bottom horse, rider, 
wagon, herd, all that was trusted to it. Fascinated 
by its ugliness and the story of its crimes, I come 
close to its edge. The oozy paste of loam which 
banks it curves glibly away from under my feet, and 
I am in the water before I know it. It is well I have 
not slipped off in a dark night, or how the greasy 
mud and the dribbling sand would toy with my fin- 
gers, and let me slip easily away ! I scramble up the 
bank by main force with a shudder. I was longing 
for a bath — had meant to try the Platte, though the 
ranchmen had informed me that it was only knee- 
deep, save in holes ; but I gave up the idea on look- 
ing at that water-fiend, a Lorelei, with all her treach- 
ery remaining, and all her graces gone. 

There is another reason why I should not go in. 
Across the desert waste from the southerly bluffs a 
torrid wind is blowing ten knots an hour. It is like 
a hot blast of the Cyclops' furnace escaping above 
ground. It comes so freighted with microscopic sand- 
grains that it is not as much the old school definition 
of wind — "air," as it is earth "in motion." I have 
been out five minutes, and there is not a pore of my 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 125 

body which it has not stopped. I feel dry and caustic, 
a sort of mineral deposit rather than a fleshly man. 
If I went into the Platte, I should be stuccoed like a 
cheap country seat before I could use a towel. The 
river, too, is as bad as the air. It is a saturated solu- 
tion of sand ; a gray sirup of silex, which drops dust 
on your hand wherever you stop a ripple. The Platte 
is never entirely dry in the usual sense ; but what 
river can be rationally drier than this, which is com- 
posed, one particle in ten, of the driest thing on the 
globe ? 

Let me take stock of this pathless waste before me. 
When they are right under my feet, I can see the 
cork-screw curls of the gray gramma. I walk a little 
further, and begin to make distinctions. Everything 
is gray, but not all of it is gramma. A little furzy 
plant, the undersides of its leaves covered with a dry 
down that rubs to powder between the fingers, of 
name unknown, but resembling the artemisias ; a 
true artemisia, from six to eighteen inches high, also 
woolly ; a single spot of orange color as large as a 
half-dime, seeming to be a poor relation of the mari- 
golds ; a stinted sunflower ; a few sickly cactuses ; this 
is the vegetable inventory. The beautiful ground- 
poppy, and all other flowers which might enliven a 
landscape, had entirely disappeared. 

Despite the nakedness of the land, it swarmed with 
ants, whose industry was manifest in cones a foot 
high, though it was impossible to see any practical 
application for it in the shape of food asking storage. 
The same famine supported myriads of cheery grass- 
hoppers, with red wings and legs, which made them, 
when they flew, the only bright objects in the land- 
scape. A reddish - brown species of cricket also 



126 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

abounded, its size averaging a little larger than our 
black insect of the States. Here is the animal inven- 
tory. I looked for lizards, and found none, though 
they may only have retired to private apartments in 
a temporary fit of disgust at their situation, since it 
seems almost inconceivable that some member of the 
family should not exist in so congenial a habitat. I 
was disappointed more especially not to find the 
horned toad, so called. A friend of mine in a "West- 
ern expedition had discovered it on the Plains of the 
North Platte, considerably east of Fort Laramie ; but 
we saw none in our present journey until within a 
day's ride of the Rocky Mountain Watershed, though 
repeatedly passing over tracts where they might rea- 
sonably be looked for. 

That night the wind blew more violently, if possi- 
ble, than it had at Willow Island. The ranch-house 
rocked under it, and such tempests of sand came fly- 
ing with it, that every crevice of the walls streamed 
with little jets, and every object that lay untouched 
for an hour was powdered half an inch deep. The 
air was intensely dry and irritating. At sundown it 
began to thunder and lighten. The flash and roar 
soon became almost continuous, and remained so till 
after midnight. With all this commotion came not a 
single drop of rain. In the States the water would 
have fallen half a foot deep. Here, though the sky 
was black as iron, it was equally hard and pitiless. 
The people told me that for years at a time the storms 
were equally severe and rainless with this one. I 
could think of nothing, when I looked at the heavens, 
but the agony of a bafiled yet unrepentant soul. 

Through the tempest of wind and sand, an east- 
going stage struggled about tea-time, bearing half 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 127 

a dozen miserable passengers, every one of whom 
looked like a cast of himself in silex, unflattered in 
expression. They had come all the way from Califor- 
nia ; and I shuddered to think whether I should have 
grown as reckless as they by the time I was equally 
near my end of the journey. Some of them seemed 
merely hanging on to life by the neck of a pocket- 
flask. Solitary confinement, with a Chinese gong 
beaten at fifteen-minute intervals, day and night, for 
six months, near one's bunk-head, could not have re- 
duced victims to a more deplorable state of despair 
and defacultization. One passenger, who, being now 
only four hundred miles or so from home, felt as if he 
were beginning to catch sight of familiar chimney- 
pots, sold his blankets to the station-keeper, under an 
impression that he would have no further use for 
them. They were of the best California variety, a 
handsome blue, little worn, and could not have been 
purchased originally for less than ten dollars in gold. 
As I soon after bought them of the station-keeper for 
two dollars and a half in greenbacks, — and nobody 
ever does anything out there except at a tremendous 
profit, — I am led to conclude that the passenger must 
have lost much of his hold on life. I felt sorry for 
him whenever I wrapped myself up in his handsome 
spoils, though they proved an invaluable addition to 
my own during the bitter nights we afterwards spent 
next the snow-peaks. 

Beyond Spring Hill, the South Platte makes the 
nearest approach to beauty which you find in it till 
you see it issuing from its lofty canon back of Den- 
ver. All the way that we skirted it during the 
remainder of the afternoon, it was studded with 
picturesque islands, green as emerald. When the 



128 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

sun declined so that its level rays overlooked, instead 
of pointing out the arid plains, and the carrion car- 
casses of dead cattle which pollute them, the view 
became quite fascinating. It was like fairy-land 
when the sun disappeared entirely, and the whole 
west became glorious with gold and purple, green 
and salmon, reflected in the slow-creeping water be- 
tween the islands. Whatever else may be lacking on 
the Plains, the sunsets are magnificent. To be sure, 
the natives cannot be held responsible for that ; if 
they could get at them, they would fry them. As it 
is, Nature triumphs over all ; and the two hours I 
used to sit on the stage-box worshipping her sunset 
divinity, were compensation enough for a whole day 
of discomfort. 

For twenty-five miles beyond Spring Hill, we rode 
through a solitude broken only by one station-house, 
a few antelope, and innumerable jackass - rabbits. 
The latter came tamely out to bathe their immense 
ears in twilight, squatting among patches of gramma 
and artemisia, or leaping across the road so close to 
us that if we had had time to stop and cook them, 
we might easily have shot a dozen as we toiled by 
them through the deep sand. 

About day-break we drew up at Beaver Creek Sta- 
tion, five hundred and thirty-three miles from Atchi- 
son, and a hundred and twenty from Denver. The 
station consisted, as usual, of a single house with the 
company's stables and corral attached, and is situated 
about three miles east of the Beaver Creek laid down 
on the maps. The light was vague when we first 
stopped, but sufficient to reveal a picturesqueness in 
the immediate landscape which set my heart bound- 
ing, after the experience of the past two days. Nature, 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 129 

for a little respite, had repented her of neutral tints, 
and forsaken the Society of Friends. The Platte had 
made a concession to our rebellious aesthetic sense, by 
sending out from the main channel, where it crept 
eastward, some forty rods north of the house, a sinu- 
ous lagoon terminating in a marsh near the road. 
All along the borders of this still but living water, 
the grass was green and thick even to rankness, and 
its high banks bore in profusion succulent weeds, con- 
generic with those . that haunt our Eastern morasses. 
As the sun grew nearer the horizon, this pleasant 
feature showed to better advantage. The eye rested 
on the broad borders and patches of living greenness, 
with a feeling of comfort that no Eastern imagination 
can appreciate. The rosy hues of as lovely a sunrise 
as I ever saw, bloomed slowly out on the spotless 
mirror of the water, with the effect of a developing 
daguerreotype or a dissolving view. The lagoon 
became iridescent upon one side, remaining black 
as night under the shadow of the opposite bank ; and 
when a light mist began rising under the touch of 
growing light, the colors shone through breaks in its 
dancing masses beautiful as a dream. Still a little 
later, then the rosy changed to golden ; and when the 
sun first showed his edge, the water was turned to a 
sheet of topaz fire. 

With advancing dawn, large game broke into view. 
I thought I had seen ducks before, but the lagoon and 
the river swarmed with them to a degree which quite 
corrected my views on that subject. Two or three 
varieties of teal, the ruddy duck, a mallard, and a 
small diver were represented in the great argosy 
that rippled the smooth, glowing water ; and beyond 
my immediate ken, there may have been detach- 



130 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ments from numerous others, Colorado possessing 
fourteen distinct species of the bird. Every step of 
my way along the margin of the main stream sent 
the quacking mistress of some future family scurry- 
ing off her loose-built nest, until the water was alive 
with gliding motion of exquisite grace, and colors of 
the most varied beauty. The cinnamon teal and the 
ruddy duck were rich warm patches that slipped past 
like tinted vapor; while the green and blue-winged 
teal shone cool and steely in the dawn which had 
come to waken them with me. It seems to me that 
I have never seen bird-life more plentiful or lovely. 

We were all seated on or in the wagon, when our 
scarred driver pointed westward across the Plains, 
now all aflood with the gold of the risen sun, and 
said, — 

" There are the Rocky Mountains." 

I strained my eyes in the direction of his finger, 
but for a minute could see nothing. Presently sight 
seemed adjusted to a new focus, an(i out against the 
bright sky dawned slowly the undefined shimmering 
trace of something a little bluer. Still, it seemed 
nothing tangible. It might have passed for a vapor 
effect on the horizon, had not the driver called it 
otherwise. Another minute, and it took slightly 
more certain shape. It cannot be described by any 
Eastern analogy ; no other far mountain view that I 
ever saw is at all like it. If you have ever seen 
those sea-side albums which ladies fill with algae 
during th^ir summer holiday, and in those albums 
have been startled, on turning over a page suddenly, 
to see an exquisite marine ghost appear, almost 
evanescent in its faint azure, but still a literal exist- 
ence which had been called up from the deeps and 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 131 

laid to rcHt with infinite delicacy and difficulty, then 
you will form Home conception of the fir.st view of 
the Rocky Mountains. It in impossihle to imagine 
them built of earth, rock, jiny thing terrestrial ; to 
fancy them cloven by horrible chasmH, or .shaggy 
with giant woods. They are made out of the air 
and the sunshine which show them. Nature has 
dipped her pencil in the faintest solution of ultra- 
marine, and drawn it once across the western sky, 
with a hand tender as Love's. Then, when sight 
becomes still better adjusted, you find the most 
delicate division taking place in this pale blot of 
beauty, near its upper edge. It is rimmed with a 
mere thread of opaline and crystalline light. For a 
moment it sways before you, and is confused. But 
your eagerness grows steadier, you see plainer, and 
know that you are looking on the everlasting snow, 
the ice that never melts. As the entire fact in all 
its meaning possesses you completely, you feel a sen- 
sation which is as new to your life as it is impossible 
of repetition. I confess (I should be ashamed not to 
confess) that my first view of the Rocky Mountains 
had no way of expressing itself save in tears. To 
see what they looked, and know what they were, was 
like a sudden revelation of the truth, that the spirit- 
ual is the only real and substantial ; that the eternal 
things of the universe are they which afar off seem 
dim and faint. 

Soon after leaving the breakfast station, we struck 
a low range of tiresome sand-hills resembling those 
about Julesburg. Through them runs to the Platte, 
Beaver Creek, the first of a series of short streams, 
laid down on the maps as draining a broad plateau 
south of Denver, and communicating with the river 



132 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

in nearly parallel lines. Bijou, Kiowa, and Cherry 
Creeks are the three others noticed; and there is a 
fourth, which does not appear on any United States 
map, emptying into the river near Denver, and 
called Coal Creek. I have said that Beaver Creek 
runs, but this is hyperbole. It just trickles. A 
thirsty mule might have stopped at one of the holes 
in its bed, and in five minutes drunk it dry, to stay 
so for an hour. Its pulse was feeble as syncope. As 
to Bijou, I do not feel that I am anticipating by its 
mention, for when we got to it there was nothing to 
anticipate; while Cherry Creek, running through 
part of Denver, is a mere bed, dry as Sahara, save 
when some express train of a snow-melting freshet 
comes thundering down from the range, to surprise 
human life and property in its murderous rush, as it 
did in 1864. 

At Junction, the next station west of Beaver Creek, 
we left the Platte, and took a cut-oflf to Fremont's 
Orchard, twenty miles across a succession of high 
sand-hills, on which the sun pelted and the dry hot 
wind blew more mercilessly than anywhere on our 
previous journey. I had left my canteen behind me 
at Diamond Spring ; one might as well look for water 
in an ash barrel as anywhere along the cut-off; and 
before we were half-way over it, I suffered from a 
thirst, only paralleled hitherto by the experience of 
my buffalo hunt. But for the misery of a parched 
tongue, a throat like a glass-house chimney, lips 
cracked by the alkali atmosphere, and the lassitude 
of a perfectly shadeless ride on the hottest day of 
the season, I should have enjoyed the new nature 
opening to study throughout this tract, with much 
zest and enthusiasm. From the time we left Junction 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 133 

till we struck the Platte again, we seemed to be in a 
new zone, both botanically and zoologically. If we 
had altered our latitude by a hundred miles, we 
could hardly have entered a fauna and flora more 
widely differing from those of the Plains proper than 
we attained by the present slight change in our topo- 
graphical conditions. We found on the long sand-hills 
which we now had to climb, a greater variety of plants 
than we had discovered over all the comparative level 
between O'Fallon's Bluff and Beaver Creek. Among 
others were by far the handsomest asclepias I ever 
saw, with profuse pink blossoms ; a beautiful rose- 
colored cactus of the branching kind, several of the 
globular varieties, and the common yellow variety in 
great profusion ; a blue daisy, seen here for the first 
time, in all but its color nearly resembling the white 
millefoil daisy of the East; several sunflowers, and 
varieties of flowering bean and pea ; a blue flower, 
apparently of the larkspur family; another poor 
relation of the marigolds, like that noticed at Dia- 
mond Springs ; star-grass here and there ; and a very 
singular blossom, quite unknown to me, which con- 
sisted of a fusiform central sack of fibrous tissue 
containing pulp, and attached to this three membra- 
nous wings, like those of a maple-seed, but much 
larger and softer, as well as differently colored, a pale 
flesh tint characterizing the fresh specimens. These 
plants all grow out of a soil which might have rivaled 
the mountains of Gilboa for ignorance of either rain 
or dew, and with a desolate, hot exposure, where 
utter sterility might have been pardoned. Though 
they flourished, and I was informed that cattle could 
subsist themselves across this waste, I saw nothing in 
the shape of herbage which even a charity broadened 



134 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

by appreciation of the gramma, could have called 
edible food. 

For the first time lizards appeared plentifully. A 
little brown-and-yellow variety, occasionally tending 
toward red, and in shape, as well as agility of motion, 
resembling the so-called chameleon of the Southern 
States, was the chief enlivener of all our toilsome 
climbs, darting across the road at our approach with 
great velocity, and whisking under the shadow of 
some fat cactus which hid everything but its beady 
eyes and betraying tail. The naturally expectable 
horned toad still failed to make its appearance. The 
air was merry with red-winged grasshoppers ; great 
liver-colored crickets basked on all the little sand- 
hummocks ; one old familiar friend of Eastern road- 
sides, the " tumble-bug," was here and there seen 
rolling its balls into a happy rotundity, under much 
more trying circumstances of ground than its rela- 
tion in the States ; a very handsome lady-bird beetle, 
in size considerably surpassing our own, and a small 
painted beetle of the pumpkin-bug appearance, fin- 
ished the more obvious catalogue of insect life on 
this tract. Less apparent to the eye,- but abundantly 
sensible to feeling, were the minute buffalo-gnats, 
which at intervals during the past three days had 
much annoyed us along the Platte, but now became 
a nuisance justifying imprecation. As if we had not 
enough to suffer from parching heat and thirst, 
mules tired to death, deep sand, and a surly driver, 
these pestilent little creatures swarmed around our 
heads and into our hair, stinging us on neck and 
scalp like so many winged cambric needles dipped in 
aqua-fortis, and utterly scouting the obstacle of a 
green barege veil which I had brought from Atchison 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 135 

for defense against them. Wherever there was the 
minutest crevice in the barrier, they swarmed through 
without the mosquito's warning hum ; and the first 
sign that these microscopic Philistines were upon us, 
was an itching which no slaps or scratches could ap- 
pease. 

Ravens, crows, here and there a variety of black- 
bird, and a small ground-sparrow were the region's 
only contributions to ornithology, so far as I observed. 
The only mammalia anywhere to be seen were a herd 
of antelope, faultlessly constant to desolation, which 
crossed the road at lightning speed about a hundred 
yards ahead of us, on their way to drink at the Platte, 
an hour before we reached Fremont's Orchard. Prai- 
rie-dogs and jack-rabbits either did not exist in the 
neighborhood, or had the wisdom and good taste to 
keep their settlements away from the cut-off, and 
themselves out of the torrid sunlight. 

The last three or four miles of our way led us 
through a series of arroyos, or deep channels, to 
which I have before referred in describing the Plains 
formation, running towards the Platte, and evidently 
at some remote geological day the drains of rapid 
water-masses, though they have not been moist with- 
in the memory of man. Everything in their direc- 
tion, their shape, and the successive terraces of their 
banks, suggests a series of water-courses only recently 
dried up ; and not until one has traversed them en- 
tirely to the fine old cotton-woods at Fremont's Or- 
chard does he give up the notion that he must be 
near some temporarily exhausted affluent of the 
Platte. They are, all of them, larger than the chan- 
nels laid down on the maps as creeks, and, to all ap- 
pearance, might as well discharge some water from 



136 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the plateau at longer or shorter intervals ; yet their 
thirstiness is a matter of ages, not of years. 

At Eagle's Nest, a station eleven miles from the 
Orchard, I observed, for the first time since leaving 
Cottonwood, a stony outcrop from the universal sand. 
It was a friable sandstone, abounding in iron, and 
possessing a curious conchoidal cleavage, which, with 
a little delicacy of manipulation, enabled me to sepa- 
rate a large piece of it in concentric basins or belts. 
Its solidification was very recent, probably belonging 
to a postrtertiary period. 

From Eagle's Nest to Latham, a distance of twelve 
miles, we rode almost immediately along the banks 
of the Platte, which here began to compress itself 
within narrower boundaries, and rejoice in higher, 
much better timbered, and more picturesque banks. 
Just west of Latham, the main trail to California 
crosses and leaves the South Platte, the river itself 
making an abrupt bend of nearly 45° from the south- 
erly direction. The road to Denver, a distance of 
sixty miles, follows up the Platte, Denver being at 
the junction of that stream with the spasmodic and 
semi-mythical Cherry Creek. Reaching Latham about 
dark, I abandoned the stage which had brought me 
thus far westward, and awaited another, which was to 
start for Denver on the arrival of the eastward pas- 
sengers. It was ten o'clock before this happy pre- 
requisite was fulfilled. The interval of waiting I was 
only too glad to consume, after a tolerable supper at 
the station-house, in a straight-out slumber among the 
grain-bags of the company's stables, having first feed 
the driver of the Denver stage to wake me when he 
got ready for the start. 

I was surprised to find the Platte becoming quite a 



THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TO THE GOLD MINES. 137 

nice stream soon after we left Latham. Its banks hid 
their sandy monotony under a fine cotton-wood fringe, 
which, without any extensive gap, continued all the 
way to Denver. The river was very narrow, in some 
places not half its width at Diamond Springs, and 
began to assume the clear, forcible look of a true 
mountain stream. Regarding this bright young brook, 
which should shortly become a melancholy sewer, I 
felt like some prophetic soul who sees the future 
outcast in the innocent child. It was sad to reflect 
what the Platte would come to. 

The night was a deUciously temperate one, the 
moon at its full, and I the only passenger who- shared 
the driver's seat; so I enjoyed unbounded facilities 
for feasting on the new landscape. There were many 
signs in it of cultivation. Ranches had dropped into 
the lap of nature; and though their surrounding 
meadows were far from what we should call green in 
the States, attempts at irrigation had been made here 
and there, and the grateful ground responded to the 
extent at least of a small vegetable garden. The 
land was a smooth rolling prairie, without high hills, 
and in some places generous enough to support a 
noble clump of trees at the distance of half a mile 
from the river. 

Nothing of any importance occurred during the 
night. The mountains, which had been growing 
plainer all day, were almost dimmed back into their 
morning romance of spirituality. Long's Peak, one 
of the loftiest in the range, rose ghastly on our im- 
mediate right ; and from the point of high light on 
its snowy head, the Sierra retreated into increasing 
mistiness toward the south, becoming a mere film of 
moonlit cobweb behind the invisible town of Denver. 



138 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

I talked with the driver as far as Fort Lupton, — a 
stockaded rendezvous and trading-post, now aban- 
doned, situated on the east bank of the Platte, about 
thirty miles from Denver, — and then curled myself 
up in the front boot, found fortunately empty, to fin- 
ish the nap interrupted at Latham. Waking after a 
couple of hours, I found the dawn up before me, and 
resumed my seat on the box for the last fourteen 
miles. 

A few miles out of Denver the signs of civilization 
began to thicken fast. The inclosed ranches became 
more frequent. One island in the Platte had been 
brought under cultivation, and adorned with a house 
and garden which would not have shamed a neigh- 
borhood of Eastern country seats. 

Finally, as we ascended a hill, Denver broke upon 
us. It was a larger place, in its first impression on 
me, than I had expected to find. It lay scattered at 
the bottom and about the slopes of a basin formed by 
the lowest foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains ; and its 
white dots, relieved against the rich brown of the 
hills, made a very cheerful contrast. At six o'clock 
in the morning, we bowled over the rim of the basin, 
and rattled down to the stage office. At the door of 
the adjoining Planters' Hotel I met some of our 
party. They had reached Denver, as we expected, 
just a day before me, without any unusual accident 
or adventure. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 

In a few days we were so thoroughly rested that we 
became tired of having nothing to tire us. We pro- 
posed to ourselves at least two subordinate trips out 
of Denver before we should finally leave the place for 
Salt Lake : the first to Pike's Peak, with the remark- 
able scenery and geological formations lying between 
it and Denver; the second to the chief Colorado 
gold mines and their business nucleus at Central City. 

Our kind friends at Denver took such a warm, prac- 
tical interest in the former of these expeditions, that 
we had hardly broached its subject when the means 
of accomplishing it were put at our disposal. Gov- 
ernor Evans very kindly offered us his ambulance, a 
comfortable vehicle, strongly built, ca,pable of accom- 
modating four persons, and the very thing for our 
purpose, and a pair of stout serviceable horses, accus- 
tomed to territorial travelling. Mr. Pierce was oblig- 
ing enough not only to pilot our expedition, but to 
contribute his own horse and buck-board to the ser- 
vice, taking our artist and his color-box beside him 
on the elastic machine. These two being provided 
for. Judge Hall occupied the fourth seat in the ambu- 
lance with myself and the two other Overlanders ; and 
having abundantly supplied ourselves with food and 
ammunition, we set out for our seventy miles' journey 
to the base of Pike's Peak, on the 10th of June, after 
an early breakfast. 



140 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Our road led us out of the southern portion of the 
town, past the barracks of a detachment of Colorado 
volunteers, called Camp Weld, in honor of the late 
secretary, who had resigned in their cause. The canip 
was a pleasant and orderly one ; the fine appearance 
of the men impressed us all. 

There is a lofty divide and wooded table-land, 
which sheds off Cherry Creek upon the east, and 
Plum Creek on the west side. This divide terminates 
in a much larger and loftier one, running nearly east 
and west from the Rocky Mountain foot-hills, an un- 
measured distance into the Plains. It is the opinion 
of many experienced frontiersmen that the Repub- 
lican Fork of the Kansas River takes its rise out of 
the eastern extremity of this divide. When we re- 
member the various masses of Rocky Mountain detri- 
tus discovered in our expedition to the buffalo coun- 
try on the lower portion of the Republican Fork, it 
certainly seems improbable that the stream rises any 
further east than this. There are not lacking hunt- 
ers and trappers who assert that they have drunk 
from the springs of the Republican on this divide ; 
but there is a long tract to be explored before the 
connection can be absolutely established. All the 
attempts which had been made to track up the course 
of the stream prior to our visit at Denver, had failed 
on account of the extreme sterility of certain por- 
tions of its banks. One train, to which a large re- 
ward had been offered for the discovery of a route 
from the Missouri to Denver along the main Kansas 
and the Republican, was obliged to turn north and 
seek the old trail, after having wallowed for days 
through sand-hills, where the teams could hardly pull 
their load, and nearly starved for lack of herbage. 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 141 

K the Republican can be proved to take its rise 
where I have supposed, its course is perhaps the 
best natural line for that portion of the Pacific Rail- 
road to be run between the main Kansas and Denver. 
Fewer engineering difficulties would exist on this 
line than on any other ; the finest grazing-land in 
America would be opened to settlement on the lower 
portion of the Republican ; and the barren land inter- 
vening between that and the high divide would offer 
no such obstacles to a railroad train as to make the 
route impracticable for cattle. 

Our present road led us from Denver to the crown 
of the smaller divide, and thence along its surface, to 
its junction with the larger. I must not omit to say 
that this latter is the watershed between the Platte 
and Arkansas rivers. It is about half-way between 
Denver and Colorado City. We proposed to reach it 
by our first day's journey, getting to Colorado City 
at the close of the second. 

Six miles of pretty level travelling brought us to 
the ascent of the Plum and Cherry Creek divide. By 
quite a steep rise we reached the top of the divide, 
and rested our horses while we enjoyed the scenery. 
From the foot of our lofty elevation the Plains 
stretched for a hundred miles to the east and north, 
to our sight as level as the sea, and still more soli- 
tary. Standing where all minor details were lost, we 
could not see the sail of a single wagon-cover whiten- 
ing the desolate, billowless main ; nor did there peer 
from it any little islets of green vegetation. It might 
have been the sea of the Ancient Mariner, and we 
" the first who ever burst " into its silence. The de- 
ception, if you choose to call it so, was quite perfect. 
But I do not like that word. Nature in her highest 



142 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

moods runs the same idea into several creations. 
Great things resemble each other. The gods are of 
one blood, and the sea is like the desert. 

A yet grander sight than the dead sea of the Plains 
invited us on our right. We had risen so far above 
the Denver basin that the foot-hills shrank out of 
sight, and the mountains behind the town uncovered 
themselves boldly to our view. From our position 
they appeared nearly on a level with us, a fact of per- 
spective which enabled us to separate them into five 
or six distinct or anastomosing ranges between the 
level plains and the highest snow-peak. The arcs 
described by each range so intersected those of the 
neighboring ranges, that Judge Hall quite aptly com- 
pared our view to a herd of travelling dromedaries. 
Equally happy was another favorite illustration of 
the judge's, frequently used in his explanations of 
Colorado geology, in which he compared the unfold- 
ing of the several uplifts at our present point of vis- 
ion to the opening leaves of the peony. 

A book on the Rocky Mountains should say some- 
thing about those mountains, yet I confess that I 
have deliberated well ere deciding to do so. The 
description I have given of their first azure blossom- 
ing on the sky west of Beaver Creek, is no dreamier 
than must be a reader's idea of the mountains seen 
close at hand, after the most vivid description that 
can be written. In the East there is nothing to illus- 
trate the Rocky Mountains by. With the Rocky 
Mountains, the AUeghanies and the Taconic have no 
common terms. Here are none of those delicious, 
turfy glades, those enameled banks, which beautify 
the mountains of our Atlantic slope. The landscape 
is without a single patch of bright green. The 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 143 

mountains rise up in rugged, brawny masses, without 
the apology of color for a nakedness that is grand in 
itself They oppress you with such sublime size, they 
are the evident stone-mask of such a tremendous force 
spent in the old centuries, that you do not miss color 
in them, — do not think of it. Every cross-twist in 
them is the cast of a muscle strained by the gladia- 
tor, Fire. 

The gentler curves, the valleys that lead out of 
sight into mountain recesses, — these are sugges- 
tions of a gentler world-time, which came after the 
struggle. They are the kisses of the Water Nymph, 
and the dalliance of bland but treacherous Oxygen. 
The Rocky Mountains are full of infinite suggestion. 
Their presence makes a thoughtful man wish to sit 
down and learn from them; there is such genius in 
it, it so overawes one. You are surprised when you 
examine this feeling, and see how few of the qualities 
which made you admire other mountains, exist in 
these. What you see is a colossal mass of brown, 
and, in its highest lights, of amber, relieved against 
nothing, mediated by nothing, its wall bounding your 
entire western horizon. It is so consistently great, 
it is a congress of such equal giants, that you cannot 
compare it with any of the ranges you have seen be- 
fore. When you rise to a higher plane of vision, this 
single leaf of grandeur becomes a book. You con- 
fess you have not seen the Rocky Mountains until 
now. Mountain billows westward after mountain, 
their crests climbing as they go ; and far on, where 
you might suppose the Plains began again, break on 
a spotless strand of everlasting snow. 

This snow indicates the top of the range. But 
of what range ? Not the top of the Rocky Moun- 



144 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

tains, but only of a small minor range in that range. 
That glittering ridge yonder is but one of a hundred 
lying parallel with it to the westward. We have not 
even yet seen the Rocky Mountains. 

I remember how the idea of crossing the Rocky 
Mountains used to look to me. It was an affair some- 
thing like the steep grades between Altoona and Pitts- 
burg, where it takes part of a day to go up, see the 
view, and come down satisfied on the other side. In 
spite of the atlas (or by favor of some of the earlier 
ones), I never could conceive of the Rocky Mountains 
except as a single range occupying a small line along 
the axis of the Continent. Comparatively little has 
been done for the geology of this region, so that sci- 
entific distinctions in that science have no more famil- 
iarized us with the multitudinous ranges than have 
those of geography. I suppose that to most Eastern 
men the discovery of what is meant by crossing the 
Rocky Mountains would be as great a surprise as it 
was to myself Day after day, as we were travelling 
between Denver and Salt Lake, I kept wondering 
when we should get over the mountains. Four, five, 
six days, still we were perpetually climbing, descend- 
ing, or flanking them; and at nightfall of the last 
day, we rolled down into the Mormon city, through 
a gorge in one of the grandest ranges in the system. 
Then, for the first time after a journey of six hun- 
dred miles, could we be said to have crossed the 
Rocky Mountains. 

The only name for the system is "nation." "Range" 
does not express it at all. It is a whole country, pop- 
ulous with mountains. It is as if an ocean of molten 
granite had been caught by instant petrifaction when 
its billows were rolHng heaven-high. 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 145 

In some places the parallel ranges thin out, leaving 
a large tract of level country quite embosomed be- 
tween snow-ridges, and, so to speak, alcoved into the 
very heart of the system. These are the "Parks;" 
and they form one of the most interesting as well as 
characteristic features of the Rocky Mountain scen- 
ery. Formations of this kind abound everywhere in 
these mountains; but the four principal ones form a 
series, running from a point considerably northwest 
of Denver quite into New Mexico. They are called, in 
their order. North, Middle, South, and San Luis Parks. 
They more nearly resemble the green dells of our 
Atlantic range than any other parts of this ; but their 
imitation is an expansion on the scale of miles to the 
inch. You might set down one of our smaller States 
in Middle Park without crowding it. 

The Parks are watered directly from the snow- 
peaks, being indeed only the inner court of those 
peaks, and catching the droppings from their eaves. 
The portions of the Parks most thoroughly irrigated, 
remain beautifully green throughout the year ; and 
over the whole region herbage is abundant. The 
sheltered situation of the Parks insure them an equa- 
ble climate; and old hunters who have camped out 
in them for months together, talk of life there as an 
earthly paradise. It will prove equally so to the far- 
mer and grazier when Colorado finds time to develop 
her agriculture. For the present they are difficult 
of access, and the most beautiful as well as the richest 
hunting-grounds in the far West. Elk, deer, and an- 
telope abound there ; wild animals of the cat kind, 
headed by the Rocky Mountain lion, are common in 
the wooded ridges that skirt them; they are not 
stinted in respect to bears, wolves, or foxes. 

10 



146 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Perhaps, too, the Parks may be said to bound the 
extreme western range of the buffalo. I saw a buf- 
falo skull, to be sure, on a dry, gravelly plain near 
the Green River ; and tradition still speaks of their 
having formerly extended all the way into Utah. But 
the climate is such an antiseptic that the remains 
seen by me may have been a hundred years old, be- 
ing white as snow and hardly more than a perfect 
cast of head and horns in the salts of lime. It is cer- 
tainly many years since a herd has crossed the moun- 
tains, many even since it penetrated them further 
than the Parks. It is not at all an every-day matter, 
at this time, to shoot a "mountain buffalo;" so little, 
indeed, that I could not get absolute certainty as to 
whether he is identical with the ordinary buffalo of 
the Plains or a distinct variety. Some of my inform- 
ants described him as the same in everything but 
habitat, while others pronounced him much larger 
and fiercer. The probability is that this animal is 
only a descendant from strays left behind a herd that 
crossed the mountains, which gradually were adapted 
to the new conditions until they present an entirely 
distinct variety. The mountain buffalo is said not to 
be migratory. If this be true, the loss of such a 
strong race instinct is of itself sufficient to form the 
base of a variety distinction. 

I have been betrayed into the artistic error (or ex- 
cellence, according to your school) of painting more 
into my picture than I could see from my camp-stool ; 
of adding after experience to the present facts of vis- 
ion. But to see the Rocky Mountains means so much 
more than the view of any one mighty ridge or peak, 
that I might just as well give its idea by glancing 
across the whole billowy main as by stopping short 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 147 

where the undulations break on that ice-bound coast 
yonder, in clouds against the blue of heaven. 

The divide we were travelling was unlike those of 
the Plains, not only in being of much greater height 
and surface, but in its possession at intervals of deep 
ravines, finely timbered with pine, and bearing an 
underbrush of scrub-oak. The divide was outside of 
the lowest Rocky Mountain foot-hills, yet at the East 
it would have been called a mountainous country in 
itself The pine was getting rapidly cleared away 
from the divide by teams and choppers for the fuel- 
market of Denver We were every now and then, 
during the forenoon, passing great ox-loads of it on 
their way there. The oak was not that black-jack 
usually recognized as the scrub variety in our Atlan- 
tic sand barrens, but a tree with a comparatively deli- 
cate round-lobed leaf An innumerable array of un- 
known peas and beans showed pretty scentless flowers 
along the road, in every shade of purple, blue, and 
pink. In some situations the ground was all aflame 
with the intense scarlet flowers of " the paint-brush." 

About one o'clock, we descended into a valley of 
the divide, about twenty miles from Denver, in which, 
for the first time on our journey, we encountered 
those sculpturesque freaks of geology which form so 
large a field of interesting study throughout the 
Rocky Mountains, and were continually presenting 
themselves along our subsequent route to Salt 
Lake. 

The steep sand-bluffs, down which our course ran 
from the high plateau of the divide to the valley, 
were curiously channeled into isolated groups and 
masses, whose form gave every possible scope to one's 
fancy. The simplest of these formations were mere 



148 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

sinuous galleries. Where the work of excavation had 
gone further, the sand rose in smooth cones or solitary 
pillars ; and in yet more complicated cases, the piles 
took a statuesque shape, which, with a trifling effort 
of imagination, became idols, gypsies about their 
camp-fire, witches, or mummies in their coffins. At 
first sight these formations were a good deal of a 
puzzle to me; but as we advanced, and saw them 
not only in the various stages, but undergoing the 
processes of production, their explanation became 
possible on at least one hypothesis, to which I will 
refer further on. 

A little beyond these statues, and in such plain 
sight of them that their moonlight view must have 
been like having a guard of honor composed of ghosts, 
we found " The Pretty Woman's Ranch " and its oc- 
cupants, the Richardsons. The nomenclature of new 
settlers is unconventionally direct. They <Jo not hesi- 
tate to say when they think a woman is pretty ; and I 
am afraid they would assert the opposite, if true, with 
equal frankness. There is no doubt what their names 
mean ; and when they call a name, it sticks. All the 
Richardsons may die ; but future travellers will have 
no difficulty in knowing that a pretty woman was 
once the ornament of this sohtude, or in finding the 
exact place on which to drop a tear for the evanes- 
cence of all things lovely. It is perhaps no betrayal 
of Coloradian confidence to acknowledge that Mrs. 
Richardson is the Pretty Woman referred to in the 
title. We stopped at the ranch which she has char- 
acterized, to give our horses their noon feed, take our 
own lunch, and, let it be confessed, to see the Pretty 
Woman, though of course solely as a geographical 
personage. The name is not inappropriate. 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 149 

Eichardson, the owner of a comfortable log-house, 
and the husband of the ranch's fair namesake, is so 
good a type of the indomitable class which turns our 
country's wastes into garden and pasture, that I can- 
not refrain from condensing into a few lines the sim- 
ple account which, while we were resting, he gave us 
of his toilsome and eventful history. 

He began his manhood (he is now a bronzed, wiry 
man of three or four and thirty) by entering the 
vineyard business with his father and brothers, near 
Catskill," on the Hudson River. After a year or two, 
the fever of adventure got into his blood, and he set 
out to seek a wider field. His way was westward, as 
that fever always drives an American, and his first 
halting-place a settlement in Wisconsin. Here he 
established a nursery, but was presently ruined (or 
what an Eastern man would call so) through a pro- 
tracted season of bad weather and the failure of his 
trees. Taking all that he could scrape together of 
the remnant of his property, he moved directly to 
Denver, and opened, among the earliest there, a store 
for the sale of groceries and provisions. Here bad 
weather came to him in the human form. He failed 
again by trusting out large bills to a set of scamps 
who were ostensibly buying an outfit to commence 
business in the mines, but in reality only wanted it 
to enable them to flee the territory, and get beyond 
their creditors. They absconded, leaving him quite 
cleaned out, without a particle either of pay or secu- 
rity. Indomitable as ever, Richardson wasted no time 
in bemoaning himself, but pushed still further beyond 
civilization to his present place, determined to wring 
out of nature the justice he could not get from man. 
The divide in whose valley he lies, is the natural 



150 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

thorouo-hfare of all travel from Denver to the Arkan- 
sas ; and he occupies an excellent position on it for 
the keeping of a " Pilgrims ' " hostelry. Oats or com 
for horses sell here at fifty cents the single noon feed 
(six pounds, or nearly corresponding to our usual four 
quarts); so that it will not surprise one to hear that 
by the end of his first year in the divide, Richardson 
had laid by two thousand dollars. But ill-luck had 
not done with him. With his savings he bought a 
handsome lot of blood-cattle, and had just finished his 
preparations for adding the business of a grazier to 
that of a landlord, when the vendor of the stock was 
discovered to be a thief, and Richardson's title to them 
smashed by the appearance of an owner with the 
proper documents, I know numbers of reputable busi- 
ness men who at this juncture would have refused to 
play any more at cogged dice with Fortune, and wound 
up their affairs with the summary process of a pistol. 
The idea never seems to have suggested itself to Rich- 
ardson. When we stopped at the ranch, he had saved 
two thousand dollars more, and invested it in a stock 
of blood-sheep, which were then on the way to him 
from the Missouri River. If I had returned overland 
from California, I should certainly have made another 
visit to the Pretty Woman's Ranch, to satisfy my 
mind about those sheep. I felt as if it would be a 
pleasure to pitch in and do a day's sheep-tending for a 
man who had kept such a brave face toward his fate. 
I sincerely hope that his sheep arrived safely, and 
that they now thrive and multiply to the extent 
which his sanguine nature expected. I believe the 
hope fully justified by the character of the country. 
There is every reason why a flock of healthy sheep 
should do admirably on the dry grass of the divide 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 151 

and more succulent nibblings along the water-courses, 
or, if protected against wild beasts, even in the scan- 
tier pasturage along the lower mountain foot-hills. 
The character of the soil and climate is such that 
foot-rot would be most unlikely to originate here ; and 
a few years would so thoroughly acclimate the stock 
as to make both its fleece and mutton valuable addi- 
tions to the revenue of any virtually unlimited land- 
proprietor like Richardson. It is unnecessary to 
praise mountain mutton to any man who has ever 
eaten Welsh saddle, or chops from the Sierra Nevada. 
Stimulated by a cruel curiosity, I ventured to ask 
Richardson if he would be discouraged supposing his 
sheep failed. He answered no ; that in that case he'd 
only return to the East, where he knew he ivas wanted, 
and go into the vineyard business again. He certainly 
had the greatest reasons which a man, according as 
he is gritty or not, can have for courage or discour- 
agement, a wife and one little boy three years old, — 
a child of astonishing precocity, who insisted that his 
first name was Denver City, and would not be paci- 
fied until we had let him sit down with us after din- 
ner, and smoke a pipe in proof of our confidence in 
that assertion. 

We paid the worthy ranchman for our noon feed, 
and took his cheerful philosophy gratis. The debt we 
incur by seeing such men is one that cannot be paid. 
Their memory is a vigor. You are better for having 
talked with them; you make other people better, 
and the benefit goes on rolling up compound interest. 
The atmosphere of the Pretty Woman's Ranch is an 
anti-periodic to blue-devils. They certainly will not 
recur the day one baits there. 

About a mile and a half southwest of Richardson's 



152 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

is a broad field, situated on the table-land, which in 
comparatively small compass contains some of the 
most interesting subjects for the geologist which are 
to be found in this country or the world. The entire 
tract is a fossil forest. Its trees, to be sure, are lev- 
eled with the ground ; but their stumps and many of 
their prostrate trunks remain in a condition of stony 
metamorphosis which may challenge the Enchanted 
Groves of fairy lore and the Arabic legend of Alad- 
din's ruby fruit. Nothing can exceed the perfection 
with which the original vegetable characteristics have 
been retained in the petrified remains. Some of the 
trunks, full ten feet in length, have become so thor- 
oughly infiltrated with silicates (chiefly of aluminum, 
having iron for their tinge), that at first sight they 
look more like exquisite imitations of trees in jasper, 
agate, or chalcedony, than the metamorphosed bodies 
of trees themselves. The translation from ligneous 
to stony substance has been so gradual, yet so per- 
fect, that you are reminded of the famous jack-knife 
which retained its identity with a new blade and a new 
handle. Probably nothing does in reality exist of 
these trees' original tissue ; but each portion of that 
tissue survived just long enough to act as a mould, 
and determine every faintest marking on the flinty 
jelly whose consolidated mass substituted it. The re- 
sult is that we have in silicates of aluminum and iron 
as perfect a representation as could be given by orig- 
inal vegetable matter, of cotton-woods, firs, and pines, 
throughout all the sizes attained by those growths. 
Nothing among mineral treasures can exceed the 
beauty of some specimens we found here. Looking 
at the cross section of one of the stone saplings, the 
merest tyro saw at a glance the history of its growth, 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 153 

and the position which it had occupied in the arbo- 
real scale, — whether it was an ordinary exogenous 
tree or a conifer, — and often, too, the age at which 
it became stone-enchanted. Its pores, its medullary 
rays, its pith, its rings of growth, and, in some cases, 
its outer bark, were preserved as distinctly as they 
were the last day it budded ; and though it possessed 
the lustrous flinty fracture common to the semi- 
precious stones, across the sharp edges, faithful to its 
origmal direction, ran the old grain of the wood as 
plain as ever. I think it was here that I felt, for the 
first time in my life, the sensation of avarice, and at 
the same time realized the sternness of that double 
test of values, portability, convertibility. It hurt me 
to go away, and leave that fieldful of gems, — ten- 
fold more interesting to me than if they had been 
diamonds, — simply because I had no means of trans- 
porting so much as one poor cart-load of the finest to 
a place where they would give all the delight, win all 
the admiration, of which they are capable. Of course 
their beauty is greatest to a mineralogist ; but they 
possess a beauty of marking and color quite apart 
from this, being intrinsically among the handsomest 
specimens of the agate and alHed stones which I ever 
saw in cabinet or show-case. 

It is somewhat dif&cult to account for this curious 
metamorphosis upon any of the commonly received 
theories of petrifaction. The stumps are evidently 
in situ ; so they cannot have been thrown up by any 
natural convulsion from a lower stratum, where they 
had been embedded and fossilized. To imagine them 
petrified by long submersion in a flood highly charged 
with silicates, is only to make another difficulty ; for 
in that case what has become of the detritus which 



154 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

should surround them, and why did these exceptional 
phenomena occur here when the lower ground, which 
must have been simultaneously under water, exhibits 
no trace of similar operations ? The most probable 
hypothesis may be that the whole tract was once cov- 
ered with strongly silicated springs, and that as fast 
as death deprived a tree of its elaborating and selec- 
tive apparatus, it became a mere mechanically acting 
bundle of capillaries, and sucked up the liquor of im- 
mortality, which made it a gem. I succeeded in bring- 
ing away but a few specimens. They are small, but 
among the most exquisite for color, lustre, and repro- 
duction of the original tissue. They vary through 
every shade of purple, brown, yellow, red, and white ; 
and almost any chance specimen that might be col- 
lected, would cut into an elegant ornament for the 
toilet or writing-table, for seal-ring or sleeve-buttons, 
of the kind for which blood-stone or onyx is usually 
employed. 

Thirty miles from Denver, on a table-land of the 
divide, we came to a peculiar hill of the butte kind, 
a single cone, rising abrupt and solitary out of the 
lev«l plain to the height of about four hundred feet, 
and crowned with a rude cube of red argillaceous 
sandstone, nearly five hundred feet in circumference 
and a hundred feet in altitude. Vasquez, a Spanish 
guide in Pike's Expedition, gave it the name of " Cas- 
tle Rock," or rather the no-name, since new settlers 
are not sufficiently in communication with each other 
to be bothered about oiiginality, and have illustrated 
the proverbial coincidence of great minds by fasten- 
ing this appellation on every one of the multitudi- 
nous castellated formations between the tertiary clay 
of the Platte region and the granite mountains of the 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 155 

Pacific. Still, at a distance, this Castle Rock belies 
the title as little as any of its namesakes. 

Accompanied by one of the gentlemen of my own 
party, I climbed to the very summit, while the ambu- 
lance halted for us below. We found the immense 
stone which formed the capital of the cone bare of 
soil and vegetation, save in crevices. On all sides it 
overhung the earth mound on which it rested to the 
distance of several feet, thus getting a look of being 
poised upon its centre, just insecure enough to in- 
crease its picturesque effect. By insinuating ourselves 
into fissures and making bold use of projecting knobs, 
we contrived to work our way around its sides to the 
upper surface. Here we found a fine breezy platform, 
perfectly level, and commanding a view in every di- 
rection, which amply repaid our trouble. Here and 
there through the gray Plains we could see a flock of 
antelope feeding quietly; one side of our pedestal 
was alive with screaming hawks, who built their col- 
ony of nests there, nowise counting on intrusion from 
such visitors as we ; we could see the little hares 
jJlaying below us in the ashen furze which thatched 
the cone ; and we could have tossed a stone on the 
roof of the ambulance, dwindled to a speck, where it 
stood awaiting us at the foot of the butte. The de- 
clining sun was bathing the great brown mountains 
in an amber glow ; and still, far off to the west and 
southerly. Old Pike was baring his giant forehead of 
white and crystal, through a gap in our nearer ranges, 
to the common splendor. It was the quietest, sunniest, 
most satisfying mount of vision we had yet climbed. 

We came down to find that the enterprising buck- 
board had come up with our ambulance, stopped to 
put Castle Rock in our artist's sketch-book, and pre- 



156 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ceded us in the direction of Pike's Peak and supper. 
We hurried on after it, and about nightfall came to a 
comfortable log-house, situated near the head of Plum 
Creek, here a mountain brook of considerable size, 
and not far from the junction of the divide on which 
we had been travelling with that which separates be- 
tween the affluents of the Platte and of the Arkan- 
sas. The house is a neat structure of sawed timber, 
all of it got out in a steam saw-mill, imported by the 
proprietor, a man named Sprague, who, like Rich- 
ardson, increases the income of a ranchman by the 
entertainment of pilgrims such as we. Here we had 
an excellent supper; and when we discovered that 
there were not enough beds to go round, those who 
were left out camped cheerily down on their blankets, 
and all slept equally well till sunrise. 

We had now reached the grand divide between the 
Platte and the Arkansas. It seemed rather a spur 
from the mountains than one of their attendant foot- 
hills. Immediately about Sprague's the scenery was 
wildly rocky. The house stood at the foot of a mag- 
nificent gray crag, seven hundred feet high, densely 
wooded with evergreen along a series of gulches 
which channeled its face at angles that nearly 
made climbing impossible. Plum Creek was quite 
embowered in the willows and willow-leaved cotton- 
woods, which belong to the never-failing water-courses 
of the Rocky range. The valley through which it 
flowed was as green as a June meadow in the East ; 
and the sweet, pure air was of itself enough to tell 
us that we had risen far above the level of Denver. 

We left Sprague's early in the morning, well satis- 
fied with his accommodations, and glad to have found, 
so deep in these solitudes a man who had evidently 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 157 

preserved many of the ideals of civilized life, who 
took a number of papers and magazines, had a good 
library, and was successfully toiling to make himself 
a picturesque and comfortable home. 

A couple of miles beyond Sprague's, the rocks, 
which had been menacing us on the right, withdrew 
further west, and left a long sloping embankment 
next us, crowned by another of those remarkable ge- 
ological freaks which I have before mentioned. On 
the plateau of the embankment, and not far from its 
edge, stood Windsor Castle. 

The resemblance was astonishing. Towers, battle- 
ments, imposing faqade, proportions, all were remark- 
ably imitated. If the bareness about it had been 
broken up by fine old trees, and the royal colors had 
floated over the flag-staff turret, one might have been 
compelled to think twice before asserting that this 
was not the palace of the Old World transported 
bodily by magic to America. The structure stood so 
abruptly perpendicular out of the table-land, was so 
entirely unsupported and unexplained, that it was al- 
most impossible to imagine it a mere mass of Rocky 
Mountain conglomerate or sandstone. Our road ran 
within half a mile of it, and at that distance little fancy 
was necessary to discern regular rows of windows, 
stately door-ways, and all other details requisite for 
completing the realization. It is very difficult to get 
any idea from an engraving of the impression pro- 
duced by these castellated formations of the West. 
If the picture makes its mimicry as strong as the for- 
mation has it, it is apt to look less like a good picture 
of the formation than a bad picture of the architec- 
ture or sculpture imitated. 

The divide continued tolerably level for about ten 



158 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

miles further, flanked on our right by a series of lofty 
undulations, crested with pine and fir, leading into 
the Rocky Mountain foot-hills. An occasional spot of 
more brilliant yellow on their amber slopes below the 
tree-line betrayed an antelope grazing in the sunshine ; 
but otherwise the loneliness of the view was intense. 
An everlasting Sabbath bathed the silent brown moun- 
tains, climbing range on range to the far glittering 
snow. They were like the stairs of heaven after the 
last soul had ascended out of earth. Not the faintest 
cry of bird or hum of insect broke the stillness of the 
shining hills next us. It was so strange to look 
southward over placid fields, yellow with noon, and 
be sure that, in all that great receding stretch, man 
was a wanderer, a guest, and not a master ; to think, 
as some deep gorge caught our eye, far up the range, 
what an unknown region lay there, virgin to man's 
tread ; that it might be ages ere its quiet were dis- 
turbed ; and that this was but one small spot among 
myriads as mysterious and inaccessible. The moun- 
tains seemed hopelessly apart from us, like the glo- 
ries we try to grasp in a dream ; yet this very hope- 
lessness gave them all a dream's grandeur, and made 
them seem rather great thoughts than great things. 
To see the Rocky Mountains in bright sunlight, to 
drink from the vast, voiceless happiness which they 
seem set there to embody, is one of the strangest 
mixtures of pleasure and pain in all scenery. 

On one of the rolling hills of the divide we stopped 
to get what we considered the finest view of Pike's 
Peak, obtained during our trip. We stopped our 
horses for an hour at the foot of the hill, and ascended 
on foot to enjoy the sight, while our artist took his 
box from the buck-board and made a color study. 



PIKE'S PEAK AKD THE GARDEN OF THE GODS- 159 

In the midst of this virgin solitude, Nature kept 
repeating fantastic freaks of sculpture and of architec- 
ture, as if she were diverting herself with trifles from 
the strain of that mighty mood in which she brought 
forth the mountains. The strangeness of effect pro- 
duced by coming suddenly on ruined temples or 
Moorish summer-houses in that untamed solitude, and 
against that tremendous background, is quite inde- 
scribable. You thought you were in the most untrod- 
den wild of a late discovered continent ; but here is 
Luxor, here Palmyra, here the Parthenon, Nineveh, 
and Baalbec. In one place the tawny columns of the 
ruin were arranged at regular intervals around an ob- 
long ; a well defined, though broken pediment, rested 
on the front row ; and about the bases of the entire 
columns lay splintered shafts and shattered capitals. 
There was such unity in the design, and such a won- 
derfully natural posture in the ruins of this structure, 
that at the moment of first sight, its character abso- 
lutely posed one. Further on, a charming little coun- 
try-house was nestled in just the nook an artist would 
have chosen, — an indentation of the hill-side, under 
the shadow of some fine evergreens. But the main 
architecture was all templar or monumental, as if Na- 
ture, eVen in her play, had not quite got down to the 
secular level from her mountain inspiration. But, 
though religious, she was still catholic in her taste, 
and moulded in Athenian or Egyptian, Gothic or Syr- 
ian, styles with equal largeness of appreciation. In 
these conglomerate structures I saw models belonging 
to the art of almost every country and time. 

About noon we came to a small trickling rill, which 
was the first water flowing to the Arkansas from the 
grand divide. It was an affluent of the Monument 



160 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Creek, which we were to intersect later in the after- 
noon. It was a miserable little rivulet. Any Eastern 
gutter would have leaked a healthier one, on an ordi- 
nary drizzly day. But water is precious in this al- 
most rainless region ; and even this poor rill has a 
family dependent upon it, — a family which takes in 
travellers too. There is a small log-house here, with 
a board over the door, on which, in rude black letters, 
appears the inscription, ''P. Garlick." One of our 
company was anxious to know if P stood for Pill ; as 
in such case it was an appropriate place for that noted 
party to live. The actual Mr. Garlick was not aware 
of any member of his family with that Christian 
name. He himself was a kindly dispositioned man of 
forty, who had edged over into Colorado from his na- 
tive Virginia, taking Missouri on the way, and adding 
a sort of Pike flavor to his original chivalry. It was 
surprising to see either Pike or Virginia in such good 
flesh as he. He weighed about two hundred, though 
in height not much over five feet six. He was appar- 
ently contented with his lot, and complained of noth- 
ing except a pair of frozen feet, which had left him 
badly maimed the past winter. It required an easy 
soul to put up with that cabin, in the absence of 
any energetic soul to mend it. It seemed miserably 
dilapidated, had broken floors or none at all, was 
chinked by numerous yawning crevices, and in the 
winter must have been about as much shelter as a 
good picket-fence. Still, in this house a family of 
two grown people and their children were satisfied to 
spend their lives. I found it easy to tell, in all our 
journey through the wilds, which of the cabins were 
settled from the Free, and which from the Slave States. 
Perhaps, in justice to the present occupants of the 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 161 

cabin, I ought to mention that they have struggled 
under one great disadvantage. We have noticed in 
the case of Richardson's place how plain-spoken Col- 
oradian nomenclature is when intended to be compli- 
mentary ; but it no more hesitates to tell the uncom- 
plimentary facts of a case. During the occupancy of 
Mr. P. Garlick's predecessors, this cabin got the name 
of " the Dirty Woman's Ranch." I fear that the mul- 
titudinous seas, aided by what little water Mr. P. Gar- 
lick can bring to the task, will not wash clean the rep- 
utation of that ranch. 

If it were possible for a Virginian Pike to be as 
neat as a Connecticut housewife, Mr. P. Garlick could 
not redeem the reputation of the Dirty Woman's 
Ranch. What's in a name ? Dreadful things ! I 
heard one Coloradian say to another, " Did you see 
the Dirty Woman?" and the other answered, "No ; 
she isn't at the Dirty Woman's Ranch any more." 
What an acknowledgment of the hopelessness of Mr. 
Garlick's job ! The ranch is still the Dirty Woman's, 
though the Dirty Woman has left forever. I was in- 
terested to see the Dirty Woman as a geographical 
landmark ; but my nearest approach to such a view 
was when a Colorado City friend showed me a very 
respectable looking young woman on horseback, with 
the words, " That's the Dirty Woman's daughter." I 
think she must have been an improvement on the first 
generation, which was said to have licked the milk- 
pans, stirred people's tea with an unwashed finger, 
and deserved the inseparable soubriquet mentioned, 
in multitudinous other ways too unpleasant to chron- 
icle. Mr. P. Garlick seemed to be aware of the name 
of his ranch, referring to the circumstances with a 
subdued air, as if he had once entertained hard feel- 



162 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ings toward the Dirty "Woman for living there before 
him, but had now partly succeeded in living the thing 
down. 

"We lunched on our own stores in the wagon, and I 
then stretched myself prone on a settee in the Dirty 
Woman's front cabin, with my head upon my hands, 
that in the intervals between napping I might detect 
the movements of certain occupants which I sus- 
pected in the cushion. In the midst of my siesta I 
was awakened at once by lively bites and a loud roar, 
and jumped up to discover that Mr. P. Garlick was in 
convulsions at a broad charcoal sketch of my sprawl- 
ing figure made on the Dirty "Woman's door. The 
likeness, considering point of view, was very excel- 
lent, and showed such a lively feeling for boots that 
in justice to our artist, I would insist on having it en- 
graved here, only I could not bear to rob Mr. P. Gar- 
lick of the cartoon. On the other hand, so magnani- 
mous was I that I explained to him its value as the 
work of one of our rising painters, and counseled 
him to keep it always. It would be a legacy for his 
children when the P. Garlicks had become Coloradian 
noblemen, with a gallery in their palace. He seemed 
to appreciate what I asked him, and promised me that 
he would never wash the sketch off. I don't think he 
would if I hadn't asked him. 

For a couple of hours after leaving the Dirty "Wom- 
an's, we travelled over a series of low spurs and 
broad sand-plains. Many of the former, along the 
course of Monument Creek, were so covered with imi- 
tations of sepulchral sculpture, which showed to fine 
advantage through sombre groves of pine, that illusion 
again became almost deception, and we might have 
been excused for fancying ourselves in the burying- 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 163 

ground of some extinct race. My remarks regarding 
Nature's catholicity of architecture in these simular 
tions apply equally to her sculpture. This marvelous 
cemetery contained obelisks, little baby grave-stones 
a foot high, truncated columns, shafts, and urns, ped- 
estaled statues, plain horizontal tablets, and royal 
sarcophagi. There was a variety about the style, and 
a naturalness about the. grouping of the monuments, 
which seemed well-nigh inexplicable on the ground 
of mere geologic chance. 

The broad plains which alternated with these spurs 
were alike distressing to our horses and ourselves. 
They were expanses of very deep and almost entirely 
barren sand, fenced a couple of miles to the west by 
high sandy bluffs just under the foot-hills. On this 
tract the day for the first time seemed oppressively 
warm, a state of things not bettered by a dry wind 
blowing sand into our eyes. Our wheels sank half- 
way to the hubs ; and large horse-flies began to swarm 
about our poor animals, settling faster than the whip 
could knock them off, and making the blood trickle 
at every bite. 

The barrenest tract which we crossed, bore abun- 
dance both of the cacti and soap-weed. Most of the 
former which I noticed, belonged either to the flat or 
globular species ; but there occasionally appeared one 
of the branching varieties, which are found at their 
highest development considerably further south, in 
the gigantic " candelabra." In Mexico I afterward 
saw them attain the dimensions of a good-sized tree ; 
standing thirty feet high, and twenty feet in circuit 
round the branches. The soap-weed ( Yucca Fihrnen- 
tosa) is the plant known in Florida as the "Spanish 
bayonet," bearing a profusion of tough, lance-shaped 



164 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

leaves, armed at the extremity with a thorn almost 
steely in its hardness and sharpness. A hedge of 
these plants is the most complete shelter against wild 
beasts or the assault of enemies. They are little used 
for purposes of defense, their main utility existing in 
the mucilaginous juice of their roots, which the Mex- 
icans employ instead of soap for laundry purposes. 
A somewhat protracted acquaintance with Mexicans 
leads me to question whether the supply of yucca 
for that purpose does not considerably exceed the 
demand. 

On this waste, for the first time since reaching 
Fremont's Orchard, we found a large colony of prai- 
rie-dogs. They were very saucy, and kept tempting 
us to shoot at them, with the usual result of wasting 
ammunition. Their mounds covered an area of sev- 
eral square miles, and all this surface was alive with 
their chattering frolic. 

Apropos of these dogs and their habits, our party 
got at issue on a point which I have never considered 
entirely settled. Among all the old plainsmen I found 
a firm belief that the prairie-dogs are not only gre- 
garious among themselves, but with owls and rattle- 
snakes. Mr. Pierce assured me that this notion was 
an entire fallacy. I had a great respect for his re- 
searches and opinion, but could not make up my 
mind to discard the popular view of the subject. I 
had heard repeated stories of both owls and snakes 
being driven out of holes where men were digging to 
examine a dog-town. I found at Kelly's Station a 
ranchman who, the year previous, had been badly 
bitten by a rattlesnake while incautiously feeling 
down a burrow into which he had just chased a prai- 
rie-dog. I am, however, perfectly willing to abandon 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 165 

the theory on proof, though its associations have be- 
come pleasantly comic and poetical, through the little 
domestic scenes which I observed at twilight in dog- 
towns along the Platte. It may be merely a coin- 
cidence that owls and dogs are found so constantly 
about the same burrows ; it may be that their bur- 
rows are contiguous, but not shared. I am only re- 
peating what my eyes saw, or thought they saw, a 
great many times. "When the sun was well down, 
and a purple gray began softening hill, and sky, and 
river, the prairie-dogs who had been chattering their 
cheery good-night for the past hour in the sand-field 
at our side, whisked their last tail within the burrows, 
and became silent all at once. Then, to all appearance 
out of the same burrows, came one by one a troop of 
little grayish owls, who, with the low stealthy flight 
peculiar to night - prowling species, began gliding 
about the sand-banks and grassy borders of the river. 
Every now and then, one of them returned to the 
dog-town, dropped down at the entrance to some 
burrow, and went out of sight. For mile after mile, 
as long as we travelled through dog-towns, and had 
light enough to see the holes, these movements kept 
occurring. So that I came to regard the dogs as the 
boarding-house keepers of animal society ; wondered 
whether they ever got into rows with their lodgers, 
were taken in by swindling owls pretending to large 
means, or let their apartments to crusty owls who 
grumbled about the way their beds were made. The 
owls became to me little Quaker bachelors going out 
for an evening stroll, or returning cozily at a not too 
dissipated hour, with their night-keys in their pock- 
ets. I own I should be sorry to find myself mistaken. 
Soon after leaving the largest dog-town, we turned 



166 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

considerably to the westward, getting in among the 
mountain foot-hills, and continuing to thread them 
until we reached Colorado City. 

Before we finally left the neighborhood of Monu- 
ment Creek, I stopped the ambulance, and ascended 
one of the most practicable hills among the number 
crowned by sculpturesque formations. The hill was 
a mere mass of sand and debris from decayed rocks, 
about a hundred feet high, conical, and bearing on its 
summit an irregular group of pillars. After a pro- 
tracted examination, I found the formation to consist 
of a peculiar friable conglomerate, which has no pre- 
cise parallel in any of our Eastern strata. Some of 
the pillars were nearly cylindrical ; others were long 
cones ; and a number were spindle-shaped, or like a 
buoy set on end. With hardly an exception, they 
were surmounted by capitals of remarkable projec- 
tion beyond their base. These I found slightly 
different in composition from the shafts. The con- 
glomerate of the latter was an irregular mixture of 
fragments from all the hypogene rocks of the range, 
including quartzose pebbles, pure crystals of silex, 
various crystalline sandstones, gneiss, solitary horn- 
blende and feldspar, nodular iron-stones, rude agates, 
and gun-flint ; the whole loosely cemented in a ma- 
trix composed of clay, lime (most likely from the 
decomposition of gypsum), and red oxide of iron. 
The disk which formed the largely projecting capi- 
seemed to represent the original diameter of the 
pillar, and apparently retained its proportions in 
virtue of a much closer texture and larger per cent. 
of iron in its composition. These were often so ap- 
parent, that the pillars had a contoiir of the most 
rugged description, and a tinge of pale cream-yellow, 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 167 

while the capitals were of a brick-dust color, with 
excess of red oxide, and nearly as uniform in their 
granulation as fine millstone-grit. 

The shape of these formations seemed, therefore, to 
turn on the comparative resistance to atmospheric 
influences possessed by their various parts. Many 
other indications, together with such reports as I 
could get from old settlers, and the experience of so 
acute a student as Mr. Pierce, led me to narrow down 
all the hypothetical agencies which might have pro- 
duced them, to a single one, — air, in its chemical or 
mechanical operations, and usually in both. Water 
cannot be conceived of for an instant among the pro- 
ducing causes, — except in its vaporous dispersion 
through the atmosphere. Rain falls too seldom here 
(never in some localities of the mountains where 
these structures abound) to work much change in 
even the most friable rocks ; besides, rain is a lev- 
eler, not a sculptor. No freshet from the mountains 
has topped these lofty hills since the creation of man- 
kind; nor are they accessible to any water-course. 
But an all-sufficient denial to the hypothesis of water 
is the shape of the mimetic structures themselves. 
Water in motion is not easily deflected, and acts like 
a plane, not like a lathe. These skillfully turned cyl- 
inders, spindles, and cones point to a tool far more 
manageable, more readily carried around curved lines, 
and more minutely delicate. 

This tool, in Colorado and other portions of the 
Rocky Mountain region, is none other than air or 
wind. This agent has never thus far received in our 
geological dynamics the importance it deserves. The 
atmosphere of this region is a chemical solvent, as en- 
ergetic in some directions as it is inert in others. Its 



168 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

oxygen is in a comparatively passive state. It will 
not rust iron exposed to it for years at a time, and 
the progress of pulmonary tubercle is often arrested 
in it at once. But over wide tracts it is charged with 
alkaline vapor, and, in virtue of that characteristic, 
possesses a power of decomposing the combinations 
of silex, which sometimes on our journey showed 
itself in ways quite surprising. I have seen large 
tracts in the heart of the range covered with crags 
and boulders belonging to a granite originally one of 
the most uniform and cohesive in texture among all 
our rocks, out of whose weather-worn faces the feld- 
spar crystals could be scraped with the nail as easily 
as one would pick the seeds from a New Year's cake. 
Several large boulders seemed to have been corroded 
through and through. I kicked them to pieces as 
easily as the softest conglomerate. 

The detritus resulting from such chemical decom- 
position has, during earlier ages, been brought down 
from the older rocks of the range in immense quan- 
tities, by the action of ice or floods. The whole region 
of the high divides we had been travelling from Den- 
ver, was thickly strown with such detritus ; and in 
some cases, like the conical hills beneath the monu- 
ments, the ground was entirely composed of it. In 
its earliest stage, it was probably all one vast rubble 
bed, whose surface became gradually comminuted 
into sand, as on the yucca plains; or triturated and 
weather-beaten into a coherent layer, like that which 
forms the capitals of the columns. 

The chemical energies of atmosphere havmg been 
exhausted in forming, with the aid of water, this 
superficially compacted drift-bed, mechanical causes 
began to operate, in the form of wind. Those who 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 169 

think such an agency inadequate to the large and 
largely varied excavations which have taken place in 
the Colorado drift-bed, need only witness a whirlwind 
like those which it was my fortune to encounter both 
along the Platte and in the mountains, to make their 
minds entirely easy on the subject. There is no 
achievement of force beyond the capability of a 
Rocky Mountain tornado. It would take too long to 
investigate all the meteorological conditions which 
underlie this fact; but one abundant reason exists 
in the contour of the mountains, and their relative 
position with the Plains. The Plains, over their 
whole sandy surface, compose a vast radiator; dis- 
charging immense quantities of heat into the atmos- 
phere during the entire sunny period of every day. 

From dawn till night-fall the superjacent stratum 
of air undergoes constant rarefaction, and, as it as- 
cends to meet the westerly current, is progressively 
carried into the higher mountain region- adjacent. 
Here it parts with a portion of its caloric, but is 
pressed back by continuous rarifications from below, 
until with darkness the process stops, at a state of 
things like the following : an immense body of air 
condensed among the mountains, but every moment 
growing colder and heavier, a comparative vacuum 
existing immediately over the Plains below. The 
result is an immediate wind-cataract, falling from the 
height of about twenty thousand feet. But this fall 
does not make a straight plunge, like Niagara. It 
descends not over a precipice, but through a chasm. 
One characteristic of the Rocky Mountains is its 
system of vast indentations, cutting through from the 
top to the bottom of the range. Some of these take 
the form of funnels, others are deep, tortuous galle- 



170 IHE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ries, known as passes or canons ; but all have their 
openings toward the Plains. The descending masses 
of air fall into these funnels, or sinuous canals, as 
they slide down, concentrating themselves and ac- 
quiring a vertical motion. By the time they issue 
from the mouth of the gorge at the base of the range, 
they are gigantic augers, with a revolution faster than 
man's cunningest machinery, and a cutting edge of 
silex, obtained from the first sand-heap caught up 
by their fury. Thus armed with their own resistless 
motion, and an incisive thread of the hardest min- 
eral next to the diamond, they sweep on over the 
Plains, to excavate, pull down, or carve into new 
forms whatever friable formation lies in their way. 
I can give no better idea of the efficiency of this 
instrument than by citing a few examples from ac- 
tual experience. First, as to carrying capacity. 
That portion of the track between Denver and Pike's 
Peak which lies across the open Plains is every year 
repeatedly buried out of sight under gravel large 
enough to make it seem macadamized, blown from 
the foot-hills, a distance of several miles, by the or- 
dinary winds of the region. It is no uncommon 
occurrence to see large trees in the path of the whirl- 
wind torn up by the roots, and carried, revolving as 
they go, a distance of several miles into the Plains. 
Stones of many pounds' weight are sometimes served 
in the same way, seeming to be retained in the ver- 
tical whirl with as much ease as a cloud of dust or a 
splinter of wood. 

Second, as to the force of the wind-auger. I my- 
self have seen a hole bored into a Colorado sand-bluff, 
several feet deep, and of sufficient diameter to admit 
one's arm, by a small spiral current which rose on a 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 171 

comparatively calm day, and without any general at- 
mospheric perturbation. The work was done in a 
few seconds ; and no machinery could have accom- 
plished it more neatly. Mr. Pierce informed me of 
much larger excavations which he had seen effected 
with equal dispatch. But the account of his from 
which I gained my best idea of the exact composition 
and operation of the wind-and-silex auger, was to the 
effect that on a certain occasion, when he was stop- 
ping at a settler's cabin during the prevalence of one 
of these mountain whirlwinds, a spiral current, laden 
with sand-grains, impinged against one of the window- 
panes, and, after a few moment's revolution, left it as 
perfect a piece of ground glass as could be made by a 
manufacturer of lamp-shades. 

It is to the agency of this wind-and-silex auger 
that I ascribe all the mimetic formations of the Colo- 
rado foot-hills. Though a tool of tremendous force, 
it possesses a flexibility which enables it to accept any 
curved path ; and this is an essential requisite of the 
instrument which can create such sculptures. It is a 
far more delicate tool than running water ; for it acts 
by mechanical force alone, while water chemically 
decomposes the rocks whose surface it is abrading, 
and crumbles them to pieces while it is channeling 
their outsides. I consider the wind-and-silex auger 
the cleanest tool that Nature works with. It corre- 
sponds to man's highest advance in a similar direction, 
— the lathe for turning eccentric surfaces. The work 
that it does, no other agency could do ; and we are 
thus indebted for one of the most characteristic 
features of our contemporary geology to a force 
scarcely noticed in its dynamics. 

About four o'clock in the afternoon we came into a 



172 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

narrow valley between perpendicular uplifts of red 
and white argillaceous sandstone, which towered, 
bare as a house-wall, to the height of three or four 
hundred feet. The effect of the sunlight on these 
brightly colored precipices was splendid in the ex- 
treme. They guarded the sides of our narrow avenue 
for a distance of three or four miles, and only left us 
at the edge of the little settlement of Colorado City. 

We drove to the one place of entertainment which 
the town possessed, — a small wooden structure, whose 
title of the El Paso House was an indication of our 
approach toward Mexican boundaries and Mexican 
manners. The latter fact was abundantly attested by 
the slovenliness with which the house was managed, 
the discomfort of its rooms, and the melancholy reck- 
lessness of its table. 

But we were in no mood to grumble, having such 
food for the eyes and head as dispensed with the ne- 
cessity of other aliment. The dozen buildings of 
which Colorado City is composed, lie in a sand plain 
at the base of the footrhills which wait upon Pike's 
Peak. The grand old mountain itself projects its 
head of glittering snow, through a gap in the nearer 
ranges which surround it, to a height and loneliness 
which almost tire imagination. Its altitude is very 
differently estimated, but cannot vary much from six- 
teen thousand feet. The best view of it is not from 
the base of its foot-hills at Colorado City, for its full 
proportions are veiled at that point by intermediate 
ranges, but far out on the Plains, east of the town, 
where for more than a hundred miles the emigrant 
sees it standing, a solitary beacon, with every detail 
melted into one heaven-piercing cone. How promi- 
nent an object it is, may be inferred from the fact 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 173 

that it gave its name to this entire region, — the man 
who came to the Colorado mines being a " Pike's- 
Peaker," though his nearest lodes were situated a 
hundred miles from that mountain by the shortest 
access. 

A mountain which I admire more than Pike's Peak 
(or at least the Colorado City view of it), is the grand 
Cheyenne, which rises a little further south, and is 
plainly visible at the rear of the El Paso House, from 
base to dome. Its height is several thousand feet less 
than Pike's ; but its contour is so noble and so mas- 
sive that this disadvantage is overlooked. There is a 
unity of conception in it unsurpassed in any moun- 
tain I have seen. It is full of living power. In the 
declining daylight, its vast simple surface became the 
broadest mass of blue and purple shadow that ever 
lay on the easel of Nature. 

Having refreshed ourselves with a good night's rest, 
in which fatigue met fleas and came off conqueror, 
we took an early start from the El Paso, to examine 
the natural features of this most interesting region. 

Our first visit was paid to a shale-bed on the Fon- 
taine qui Bouille, in which I had heard through Mr. 
Pierce of the discovery of interesting tertiary re- 
mains. 

Mr. Garvin, a man of varied experience as sailor, 
hunter, miner, and merchant, who had finally settled 
down among the Rocky Mountains, and was conduct- 
ing a Colorado City branch of George Tappan's house, 
accompanied us in our examination, and much as- 
sisted us by his knowledge of localities. We were 
joined by another gentleman of the same name, but 
no relationship with the former, (a singular coinci- 
dence in so small a directory!) a Dr. Garvin, whose 



174 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

practice is probably more extensive than any physi- 
cian's in the world, — bounded like a State, by the 
Arkansas on the south, the Platte on the north, the 
Rocky Mountains on the west, and some indefinite 
line on the Plains to the eastward. This is a case in 
which a doctor must keep his horse. How many calls 
can be accomplished in a day by a medical man who 
has one case of high fever on the top of the snow- 
range, and a low typhoid patient on the Plains of the 
Arkansas, may be imagined by merely consulting the 
atlas. Still another gentleman joined our explora- 
tions about the Fontaine qui Bouille — Mr. Sheldon, 
a resident engineer in Mr. Pierce's department, who 
shared his chief's enthusiasm for science, and had col- 
lected a small cabinet embracing some very valuable 
geological specimens. 

The Fontaine qui Bouille (here pronounced " Fon- 
ten kee Boo'yeh ") is a clear and rapid stream, about 
ten yards wide, and two feet deep, issuing from a 
canon near the true base of Pike's Peak, and skirting 
the edge of the Colorado City settlement, with a 
southeasterly course towards the Arkansas. Half a 
mile below the El Paso House, it has been pressed 
into the service of a gristrmill by a rude dam of stakes 
and slabs. The little pond resulting from this arrange- 
ment gave us a nice opportunity to bathe. We were 
not slow to avail ourselves of it, and found the nearly 
snow-cold water the most delightful tonic we had en- 
joyed since our parching journey across the Plains. 
Having finished our bath with a cold shower below 
the dam, we dressed ourselves, and proceeded to 
work. 

The mill, possibly owing to the fact that Colorado 
as yet buys most of her flour in sacks from the East, 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 175 

was not in operation, and did not seem to have been 
for a considerable time previous. This fact facilitated 
our investigations, some of the most interesting exca- 
vations being in the bank near the water-wheel, and 
at the bottom of the stream beyond the sluice. 

The bank was a perpendicular mass of shale inter- 
spersed with alluvial soil (the former predominating 
as we went deeper), about fifteen feet high, immedi- 
ately below the mill, and running a number of rods 
without much change of elevation. Through this mass 
the long fibrous roots of young willow and cotton- 
wood trees growing on the edge of the bluff, had pen- 
etrated and reticulated in all directions. The shale 
itself was almost purely argillaceous, and broke into 
cubes or scaled into laminae with equal ease. A more 
friable matrix, one apparently less favorable for the 
preservation of remains, could scarcely be imagined. 
Every geologist at the East knows in what low esti- 
mation the softer shales are regarded as a store-house 
for fossils, and how little reasonable hope there is of 
finding perfect specimens there, especially of the 
more delicate sorts. This shale was a more unlikely 
looking one than the brittlest of our Eastern strata. 
Yet, by the aid of a common jackknife, a hammer, 
and a shovel, we extracted from it a better preserved 
and more interesting collection of remains than I ever 
got from an equal area with thrice the labor. The 
great bulk of them belonged to a single species of 
tertiary oyster, resembling our modern mollusk in 
shape, but larger and heavier, with a beauty of color 
on its inner surface not surpassed by the mother-of- 
pearl shells which adorn East Indian cabinets. I was 
astonished to find the delicate arragonite lining as per- 
fectly preserved and freshly iridescent as if the animal 



176 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

had died an hour before. Not until the shells had 
been exposed to the air for several hours did the na- 
creous layer begin to scale off, and leave the coarser 
structure bare. Noticing this occur in some of the 
specimens, I gave the others a thin coating of glue 
which quite successfully arrested their further deteri- 
oration. 

Patient digging in the shales was also rewarded by 
some fragments of an equally well kept ammonite. 
Though we succeeded in getting out no single perfect 
specimen, the remains were sufficiently complete to 
be characterized as Ammonites Jnson. In Mr. Sheldon's 
collection we found several specimens of this mollusk 
much larger and handsomer, one nearly entire, ob- 
tained near the place where we were working. But 
the most interesting remains of this shale are the 
baculites. Several found here have measured eigh- 
teen inches in length, and exhibit a clearness in their 
curious markings, points, and iridescence so startling 
that one can hardly credit them to an obsolete period, 
and might almost be led into hunting the bed of the 
creek for contemporary specimens. On our return 
from the creek, we availed ourselves of the kindly 
proffered house where Mr. Garvin was keeping his 
bachelor menage entirely alone, and passed a couple 
of hours in sorting, varnishing, labeling, and pack- 
ing the results of our investigation among both the 
conglomerates and agates of our past two days, and 
the shales of the Fontaine qui Bouille. 

On the following day, the same party went two 
mUes and a half up the Fontaine qui Bouille to visit 
the springs which gave it its name. The road along 
the bank of the stream from Colorado City is a pure 
impromptu affair to every fresh comer; but by skillful 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 177 

driving, we managed to steer between boulders, and 
get the ambulance into the neighborhood of the 
springs, accompanied by several gentlemen on horse- 
back. 

The springs no doubt originally bubbled up from 
the bed of the river, but immense depositions of 
Glauber's-salts, or sulphates of lime and soda, have 
raised the principal fountains ten feet above the creek 
level, and they now rise in basins at the top of im- 
mense masses of this incrustation, standing perpen- 
dicularly out of the stream. 

The Glauber's-salt taste of the waters is agreeably 
modified by a stream of carbonic acid, which jets up 
through the middle of the basin, keeping them con- 
stantly in a state of violent ebullition to the height 
of two or three inches. There are two of the main 
springs on the south side, and one on the north of the 
stream. The last is the most pungent. There are 
also along the base of the south bank, higher up, a 
number of small and comparatively quiet springs, one 
of which is an inky chalybeate, and the other a white 
sulphur. The alkali of the larger springs is evidently 
undersaturated with acid. We made as good lemon- 
soda water as I ever tasted, by filling in the liveliest 
part of the main spring, and corking up instantly a 
bottle, which we had previously charged with half a 
pint of lemon syrup and half a table-spoonful of tar- 
taric acid. The water which we bottled without any 
mixture^ and took back to the El Paso with us by 
way of experiment, resembled Congress water when 
opened an hour or two after, though lacking the sa- 
line flavor. The northern and more pungent spring 
somewhat reminded me of Vichy, and the chalybeate 
was rather like Pyrmont. 

12 



178 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

These springs are very highly estimated among the 
settlers of this region for their virtues in the cure of 
rheumatism, all cutaneous diseases, and the special 
class for which the practitioner's sole dependence has 
hitherto been mercury. When Colorado becomes a 
populous State, the springs of the Fontaine qui 
Bouille will constitute its spa. In air and scenery 
no more glorious summer residence could be imag- 
ined. The Coloradian of the future, astonishing the 
echoes of the Rocky foot-hills by a railroad from Den- 
ver to the Springs, and running down on Saturday to 
stop over Sunday with his family, will have little 
cause to envy us Easterners our Saratoga as he paces 
up and down the piazza of the Spa Hotel, mingling 
his full-flavored Havana with that lovely air, quite 
unbreathed before, which is floating down upon him 
from the snow-peaks of the range. 

Leaving the springs of the Fontaine qui Bouille, 
we rode to a spot about two miles northward of Col- 
orado City, which is called " The Garden of the Gods." 
This fanciful name is due to the curious forms as- 
sumed by red and white sedimentary strata which 
have been upheaved to a perfect perpendicular on a 
narrow plain at the base of the footrhills, with sum- 
mits worn by the action of wind and weather into 
their present statuesque appearance. There is not 
much garden to justify the title ; but it would not be 
difficult to imagine some of the curious rock-masses 
petrified gods of the old Scandinavian mythology. 
These masses, upon their east and west faces, are 
nearly tabular. Some of them reach a height of 
four hundred feet, with the proportions of a flat 
grave-stone. Two of the loftier ones make a fine 
portal to the gatewav of the garden. Their red is 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 179 

intenser than that of any of the sandstones I am ac- 
quainted with, in a bright sun seeming almost like 
carnelian. A rock of similar look and type which I 
have omitted to mention on the way from Denver, 
was at least four miles away, yet made as clear and 
conspicuous a blot of red against the mountain-side 
as if it had been laid on with a heavily charged 
paint-brush. This, from some fancied resemblance, 
was called " Church " or " Brick Church " Rock. 

These " gods " rise abruptly out of perfectly level 
ground. The right hand or northern warder of the 
gateway is more wedge-shaped than tabular, and con- 
tains within it a cavern, which we penetrated with 
some difficulty by a small aperture opening near the 
base of the western side. Twelve feet of prostrate 
squeezing brought us into a vault about fifty feet 
long, ten feet high, and a dozen wide. We lighted 
our candles, but there was not much to see. The 
walls of the hollow were damp ; but there was no 
dripping water, and of course, in a gritty rock like 
this, there were no stalactites or secondary forma- 
tions of any kind. One of the other red rocks 
resembles a statue of Liberty standing by her es- 
cutcheon, with the usual Phrygian cap on her head. 
Still another is surmounted by two figures which 
it requires very little poetry, at the proper distance 
from them, to imagine a dolphin and an eagle as- 
pecting each other across a field gules. The spine- 
cracking curve of the dolphin, and his nice, impossibly 
fluted mouth would have delighted any of the old 
bronze-workers. Quentin Matsys would have used 
him for a model in some civic fountain. The eagle, 
too, was quite striking. Together, we regarded these 
animals as the emblems of our national supremacy 



180 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

over field and flood, and named them The American 
Arms. Another rock resembles a pilgrim (poetical, 
not Plains' variety) pressing forward with a staff in 
his hand ; another is supposed to look exactly like a 
griffin. Indeed, from the right point of view one feels 
that a griffin must very probably look thus, though 
the difficulty of comparing it with an original speci- 
men prevents absolute certainty. 

It was a great disappointment to some of our kind 
friends that our artist did not choose the Garden of 
the Gods for a "big picture." It was such an in- 
teresting place in nature that they could not under- 
stand its unavailability for art. Everywhere we went 
during our journey, we found the same ideas prevail- 
ing, and had to be on our guard against enthusiasms, 
lest we should waste time in getting at the " most 
magnificent scenery in the world " to find some 
solitary castle-rock or weird simulation of another 
kind, which, however impressive it might be out- 
doors, was absolutely incommunicable by paint and 
canvas, when the attempt to convey it, being simply 
the imitation of an imitation, must have looked either 
like a very poor castle, or a mountain put up by an 
association of stone-masons. But the artist's selective 
faculty is not to be looked for among practical men. 

The morning after our visit to the god-patch, we 
bade good-by to our friends at Colorado City, and 
once more turned our ambulance, now considerably 
heavier by a rich collection of specimens, in the di- 
rection of Denver. Instead of keeping near the 
outer edge of that field of giant grave-stones be- 
tween which we had picked our avenue on the way 
down, we followed the Fontaine qui Bouille up to its 
effervescent springs, took a last deep draught of the 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 181 

champagne which Nature keeps there endlessly on 
tap, and, steering inward, passed the gods in final, 
quick review. 

Just as we got to the gateway of the Garden of 
the Gods, one of our ambulance horses broke his 
whiffletree by a sudden start. His excuse was an 
alarm from a gun fired by a gentleman of our party 
at one of the numerous hares which we encountered 
in the furze about the Garden. He and the gentle- 
man magnanimously divided the inconvenience of the 
accident; the one riding and the other letting himself 
be ridden down to Colorado City for a new spar. 

We were not sorry for an excuse to linger beyond 
our intention in one of the most interesting spots of 
the Continent. In politeness to us, that portion of 
the expedition represented by the buck-board also 
halted. Pierce geologized, and the artist sketched. 
Judge Hall found sufficient employment in the mere 
act of admiration ; expressing himself with an en- 
thusiasm in regard to the gods, which assured me 
that they were gods indeed, being no respecters of 
persons, — else had they risen and bowed to the Chief 
Justice of the Territory. The other member of our 
party went hare-hunting with good success, using the 
gun which the gentleman in search of the whiffle- 
tree had left behind him, — a state of things which 
has its high moral illustration in the history of vir- 
tue from Hogarth down to the last Sunday-school 
book, or herein, where the bad little boy, who fires 
in an original style out of the coach, has to go away 
from the hares, and get a whiffletree, while the good 
little boy, who was careful not to fire till he could do 
it under the most proper circumstances, stays behind, 
and shoots a great many hares with the bad little 



182 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

boy's gun. We remarked to our bad little boy, on his 
return, that we regarded him as a lofty moral lesson. 
It was a very hot day to ride five miles in the open, 
on a hard trotting horse and bare-back ; so that he 
did not wish to be a lofty moral lesson, and expressed 
that view strongly. 

As for myself during his absence, I gave over all 
thought of business, and wandered around in a much 
more assthetic atmosphere than yesterday. I visited 
the gypsum hill near by, and, instead of asking it ques- 
tions, let it talk to me. The intense glow of to-day's 
sun made it more lustrous than I had seen it before ; 
or else it may have been that my eyes were no lon- 
ger occupied with minutiae of structure, and gave 
themselves up to its entire impression. It was a 
beautiful object in the landscape ; such an exquisite 
pure white, with such a fleecy look from the softening 
influence of the debris scattered over its crystals, 
that a poet would have called it one of the gods' 
sheep who had lain down in the garden when the 
doom came, and suffered petrifaction with his masters. 
I interested myself in the attempts which here and 
there were making by inhabitants of Colorado City 
to turn the level bottom below the Garden into a 
valuable tract for agricultural purposes. It requires 
little expense of time or labor to secure a foothold on 
Uncle Sam's soil in this Territory. Four notched logs 
laid in a square on the ground, will keep a preempted 
quarter-section for a year, being to all legal intents, 
as has been decided, sufficient earnest of the fact that 
the owner purposes building " a house suitable for 
human habitation." During our present trip we saw 
several such squares of logs; and they were quite as 
well respected by new-comers as if they had been 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 183 

squares of infantry. At one time Mr. Garvin had 
set his stake in the Garden of the Gods, intending to 
enjoy the luxury of ownership in that great natural 
curiosity ; but other business prevented his carrying 
out his plan of a large house there, and, not to inter- 
fere with actual settlers who might wish the spot, he 
finally withdrew his claim. George Tappan, some 
time before I came to Denver, preempted the section 
containing the springs of the Fontaine qui Bouille. 
But Nature is not quite as easy with the new settler 
as Uncle Sam. If she is to yield him anything, she 
demands pay beforehand. He can't put in his seeds, 
and give her a due-bill on Heaven to be presently 
paid in showers ; but he must advance her moisture 
in the shape of irrigation, prior to all possibility of 
her growing a valuable crop. Through the low 
bottom immediately east of the Gods' Garden, I 
found a number of " sequis," or distributing ditches, 
already run, connecting with a small rivulet which 
came from Camp Creek Canon, and fell lower down 
into the Fontaine qui Bouille. Along these grew a 
profusion of the willow-leaved cotton- wood, a tree? so 
much resembling the common swamp willow of our 
Eastern States, that but for the character of the bark 
I should have taken it for an old friend. The cotton- 
wood with the cordiform leaf abounds around Den- 
ver, but is comparatively scarce here. Wandering 
through the thicket, I collected several of the largest 
and most gorgeous butterflies found out of California, 
and had my first open-air interview with a Colorado 
rattlesnake. He was so near me, as I stooped to put 
my hat over a giant papilio sucking from the mud of 
the stream, that if he had not been a noble enemy, 
he could have killed me more easily than I caught the 



184 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

insect. But he lifted his head out of his coil, rattled 
vigorously, and as I leaped back to break off a sapling 
for his benefit, slipped quietly out of sight into an 
overgrown " sequi." He was five feet in length ; and 
though, as may well be supposed under the circum- 
stances, I did not undertake to count his rattles, 
he had every look of a veteran. But for his noise, 
the ordinary observer, familiar with our Eastern and 
Southern snake, would not have taken him for a cro- 
talus at all, the brown of his clouds being so much 
duller, and shading into ashen gray without the least 
yellow tinge in it. Besides, his length is never as 
great as that attained by our varieties, four and five 
feet being his average, and six feet a somewhat un- 
usual measure. He is none the pleasanter pet for 
these differences. His poison is quite as deadly as 
his Eastern cousin's, though I must do him the justice 
to say that he is not such a bore, and keeps himself 
much further from the sight of civilization. In all 
our wanderings through the wildest parts of the Con- 
tinent, I only saw one other living rattlesnake in the 
open air, and perhaps half a dozen that had been 
killed, and were lying in our track. The creatures 
showed every anxiety to get out of man's way, and, 
it is to be hoped, .will never learn the habits of their 
Virginia congeners, who make a rendezvous of the 
rock foundation under a house, and a profession, on 
sunny days, of biting the children. One of our party, 
in an expedition to the mountains, had one of his 
ambulance mules bitten on the nose while feeding on 
a green bottom among the Wind River peaks. Every- 
body counseled him to shoot the beast, insisting that 
he could not save him. But he Hked the mule, as 
possessing a somewhat sweeter temper and happier 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 185 

view of life than are usually enjoyed by his tribe, so 
he determined to cure him. In the first place, he tied 
a small package of gunpowder across the wound on 
the nose, bandaged the mule's eyes, and exploded the 
charge. Following this novel method of actual cau- 
tery, he bound upon the spot a paper of moistened 
fine-cut tobacco. Then, with the assistance of his 
men, he held the mule's mouth open, and poured an 
entire bottle of raw Bourbon whiskey down his throat. 
After that — he did nothing more. The mule lived to 
thank him, and pay his bill for medical services, by 
drawing him home to the white settlements ; but I 
suspect that there were moments during the prog- 
ress of the cure when Mr. Mule wondered seriously 
whether it was worth while. (In saying Mr. Mule, 
I do not intend to be eccentric; but really, over this 
entire region, that term of respect is so habitually 
applied to animals as to lose the slightest semblance 
of badinage. The old hunter says, "I up with my 
rifle, and down goes Mr. Antelope ; " or, " Mr. Bear 
sat up, and took one of my dogs right across' the 
scalp;" or, " Mr. Indian lay in the bushes waiting for 
the train." It is a title given to anything that has 
made the settler trouble, or in any way measured 
forces with him; given half in mockery of a con- 
quered foe, but mostly, I suspect, with an instinctive 
veneration for the force of character which has made 
the victory costly. What did Mister originally mean 
but master ? I am, however, getting too philological 
even for a parenthesis.) 

We had been employed at the Garden of the Gods 
in our various fashions for a little over two hours, 
when our ambassador returned with a whiffletree. It 
was manufactured out of an old awning-post belong- 



186 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ing to some discarded emigrant wagon, and had sev- 
eral holes in it, where the curtain-buttons had been 
screwed in. But it was neatly made, and the only thing 
we could get. The blacksmith of the settlement, who 
was also its wheelwright and general mechanic, had 
made a tour among all the ruins of his shop before 
he could find a piece of timber suitable for our pur- 
pose. It is a curious fact that no hard wood like our 
nutrtrees, ash, and white-oak, is to be found among 
the native growths of Colorado. There is plenty of 
pine and cedar timber in the high mountain gorges, 
some spruce and fir ; but all the work which has to 
endure strain, must be made from imported woods. 
It is not long since young hickory, not particularly 
well seasoned, sold as high as forty cents a pound in 
this region. An old pair of ash thills will often bring 
more money, for purposes of cutting up and making 
over, than an entirely new pair, of the best workman- 
ship, would cost in New York. There seems ,to be a 
fine field open to any man who can resist the temp- 
tation of immediate and perhaps munificent returns 
offered by speculation and the mines, long enough to 
try the acclimatization of the hard woods in Colorado. 
There is but little doubt that a nursery of hickories, 
English walnuts, white-ashes, and oaks, would flourish 
almost anywhere between Denver and Latham, along 
the banks of the Platte. It certainly would take but 
little time and energy to commence the experiment, 
by planting the nuts, seeds, or acorns. No enterprise 
takes better care of itself from the first start ; and if 
it succeeded, the proprietor would have the satisfac- 
tion of a fine source of revenue yearly, doubling its 
value before his eyes, with the certainty that in twenty 
years he might command the entire markets of Den- 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 187 

ver, Central, and Colorado cities, in virtue of the 
mere fact that he was first in the field. Vast quan- 
tities of hard wood are needed in Denver and the 
mines; jet the impossibility of getting it close at 
hand is so great that I have seen men come into 
George Tappan's store, buy half a dozen imported 
rakes, and break off the teeth and bows to make fish- 
poles of the handles. Nothing else sufficiently strong, 
light, and pliant was to be had for love or money. 
Every train of Tappan's, Byram's, or the other mer- 
chants running wagons from the Missouri, brings out 
a cargo of the hard woods ; but these necessarily 
command prices which must long ago have stimu- 
lated Coloradian enterprise into attempting tree cul- 
ture for itself, had not the one idea of mining hith- 
erto absorbed every faculty of the people. This mat- 
ter must and will right itself in time. At least, I 
hope so ; for certainty is not quite possible to one who 
has seen the same destitution prevailing in parts of 
Oregon which have been much longer settled, have 
no excuse in the importunity of mining, and very lit- 
tle help to their condition from anything like a well 
perfected system of imports. 

What I have said touching this matter may seem 
too large an excursion from the recital of our trip; 
but it is my object, so far as possible, to take the 
reader along with me, let him see what I saw as it 
occurred, and have him share the suggestions awak- 
ened within me as they arose on the spot. We shall 
thus be in less danger of overlooking many appar- 
ently trifling but still important traits of the country 
and people we travel through, which by their minute- 
ness might slip the grasp of a more orderly and am- 
bitious classification. 



188 THE HEART OF , THE CONTINENT. 

On the whiffletree having been adjusted, we re- 
sumed our line of march, turning, in about five miles 
from Colorado City, between shaggy precipices and 
thickets of low evergreen, to the canon of Camp Creek. 
The character of the uplifts in the mouth of this 
canon is even bolder than at the Garden of the Gods. 
The most remarkable columnar structure that I saw 
in our whole journey exists here, in an obelisk of the 
same brilliant natural brick which forms the material 
of the Gods, rising quite unsupported to the height 
of about four hundred feet, with a curious swell at 
its summit which much exceeds in circumference the 
lower portion of the shaft, and gives the whole struc- 
ture a look of self-poise and strong insecurity in the 
face of natural laws, not excelled by the Leaning 
Tower of Pisa. I was compelled to sketch it for my- 
self, there being so much more artistic work at hand 
for the artist's pencil ; but I could not give with my 
black lines an idea of the color, however truthful the 
drawing in figure. How much is lost by the absence 
of color, may be conceived by imagining a shaft 
higher than the loftiest steeple of our metropolitan 
churches, red as blood from foot to capital, and re- 
lieved against dense green rock-pines, bare brown 
mountains, shining uplifts of the white variety, or 
the intense blue sky of a Colorado summer. 

Behind the obelisk to the west, the canon entered 
the mountains between heightening walls of an unri- 
valed savage beauty, its last glimpse being a lofty 
gap with serrated edges like a giant's staircase, 
formed by the great mass of schistose sandstone 
broken into square blocks. Neither in pictures nor 
landscape do I remember a more exquisite gradation 
between foreground and sky than that which led my 



PIKE'S PEAK AND THE GARDEN OF THE GODS. 189 

eye from the tall red obelisk to the glimpse at the 
top of the canon. 

Nothing occurred on the return to Sprague's — our 
half-way house both going and coming — more impor- 
tant than the shooting of a fine sickle-bill curlew, 
which was floating over the long sandy dog-plain I 
have before noticed. The last place where I had held 
a curlew in my hands was far up the St. John's River, 
among the tangled yellow jasmines and convolvuli 
that border Floridian lagoons ; and it was a singular 
sensation to see this bird so far away from all his (to 
me) familiar haunts. But the curlew is considerable 
of a cosmopolitan. In regard to this bird we were 
compelled to acknowledge a fact that often forced 
itself upon us afterwards. There is no use in attempt- 
ing to collect such specimens, unless one goes spe- 
cially provided for the purpose. You cannot satisfy 
yourself on the vast field between the Missouri and the 
Pacific by naturalizing merely en amateur. You must 
set out with something more than an empty box and 
a piece of arsenical soap. The climate, being anti- 
septic, is in your favor ; but all else is against you. 
You have no adequate means of packing your skins, 
and keeping them from vermin; none for transport- 
ing them safely, on the wild routes which we trav- 
elled, and in the way we were compelled to travel 
them. Mineral specimens are all that the amateur 
can be sure of getting home to the States in good 
order. This vast field of the Central Continent must 
be beaten by specialists, each provided with his own 
definite plan, tools, and means of carriage. At the 
best, he will have to sacrifice much that it is a real 
pain not to carry away ; for his collections accumulate 
faster than he will ever be able to forward them to 



190 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the settlements till the Pacific Railroad has opened its 
great artery from Pike's Peak to the sea. So, despite 
our arsenical soap, this fine curlew eventually be- 
came so much deteriorated that we had regretfully 
to throw him away. 

I will not stale these pages by a review of the 
route between Sprague's and Denver. We took din- 
ner at the Pretty Woman's Ranch, and came down 
the slope of the Cherry and Plum Creek Divide just 
after sunset, getting in twilight a magnificent view 
of fires which were devastating the dense fir and 
pine growths of the mountain gorges behind Denver. 
The smoke and heated air from the vast chimney- 
draughts of the canons were wafted full in our faces ; 
and the leaping sheets of flame, or their flickering 
fringe along the forest top, almost crackled in our 
ears, and added to the evanescent orange of sundown 
a bloodier, baleful red. 

It was about nine o'clock in the evening, when, 
after a ride through a perfect Shaker meeting of 
jumping hares, we got over the broad plain between 
the divide and Jim Beckwith's station, skirted the 
silent Platte lying steel-gray in twilight shadow, 
whirled past Camp Weld, and came into Denver. 



CHAPTER V. 

INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 

The day before our party left Denver finally, was 
passed by myself in visiting, under Mr. Pierce's guid- 
ance, one of the principal coal outcrops thus far dis- 
covered in the Territory. 

For a wonder, our dust was laid by a fine drizzling 
rain, which lasted the entire day. The ranchman at 
whose house we stopped to dine, was quite delighted 
by it. It was doubtless a godsend to his crops ; but, 
aesthetically speaking, Colorado does not look well in 
a shower. The Plains seem surprised by it. There 
is none of that bright, thankful receptivity in them 
which rain meets from every grassy stretch in the 
East. There is no hope of their laughing back at 
bounty in a gayer green, — a green like our meadows, 
growing greener even while you look at it, and the 
rain still falls. 

In spite of the drizzle, our blankets and water- 
proofs kept us perfectly comfortable on Mr. Pierce's 
buck-board. Sixteen miles of tolerably smooth driv- 
ing, picked out by ourselves among the undulations 
of the Plain north of Denver, brought us to what was 
called " the Mine." Nobody was working it at pres- 
ent. It was situated on an entered quarter-section, 
and some uncertainty as to the title retarded its 
development. 

Thus far the workings had been limited to a single 



192 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

lateral shaft, running into the face of a low bluff for 
the distance of thirty or forty yards, and laid with a 
wooden tramway, upon which were several small cars, 
still in good order. The coal was instantly recogniz- 
able as tertiary, and must have been among the latest 
lignite formations of that period. The nearest brown- 
coal layers are, I believe, generally referred to the 
miocene. This I think subsequent to the miocene. 
The vein was distributed through a bed of friable, 
bituminous shales and clay. Both the coal and the 
shales contained perfect impressions of still contem- 
porary plants. We found numerous specimens of 
leaves from both the common varieties of cotton- 
wood and the swamp-willow ; also of an entire plant 
belonging to the bulrushes. The coal deposit seemed 
surrounded by the shales mentioned, both above and 
below. It burns with a brisk flame and fragrant oily 
smoke, like the English soft coal, but has much less 
body, and consumes to ashes without coking. We 
saw enough of it, and heard sufficiently of other like 
discoveries near by, to be sure that this mineral is 
abundant about Denver, and may be profitably mined 
for domestic purposes. 

I think it not at all improbable that petroleum 
will yet be discovered in the Plains of Colorado. Its 
origin is not yet among the certainties of science ; 
but the only certain fact about it, that it is a result 
of vegetable decomposition under pressure, makes us 
look for it in the underdrainage of all such beds as 
that near Denver. It seems to play the part of 
molasses to the sugar of coal, comprising the carbon 
particles which could not be caught out of solution, 
and brought within the cohesion of the solid form. 
The underlying calcareous formations of the chalk 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 193 

and tertiary exist everywhere over the Plains, in 
basins which form the most natural reservoirs for a 
petroleum deposit, and are often sufficiently indu- 
rated to retain it, 

On the way back to Denver, we found growing on 
one of the sand-hills a running verbena entirely new 
to both of us ; in form exactly resembling the scarlet 
variety of our gardens, but bearing profuse blossoms 
of a brilliant blue tint, which would have thrown into 
ecstasies any of those florists who have spent such 
effort to produce it artificially. We dug up several of 
the plants, and, the rain favoring, kept sufficient soil 
about the roots to transplant them successfully in Mr. 
Pierce's garden on our return. 

The day before we left Denver, we had an oppor- 
tunity to witness one of those periodic incursions of 
the Arrapahoe tribe of Indians, which led a new-come 
Irishman to ask on one occasion " whether that was 
the reason why Americans called the season Indian 
summer." In Denver nobody says "Arrapahoe." The 
wag who first misquoted " Lo the poor Indian " has 
perpetuated himself in Denver by the fact that In- 
dians there are always called "the Lo Family." 
"How are you, Lo (or Mr. Lo)?" is the familiar 
address of a copper-colored warrior. Of a sudden, 
just about midday, the Messrs., Mistresses, Masters, 
and Misses Lo swarmed in the streets of Denver, with 
as little preface as seventeen-year locusts. They 
might have come out of holes in the ground. Some 
of the men had magnificent buffiilo-robes, elegantly 
worked and stained on the inside ; others had robes 
of wolfskin; and I saw a number of fine blankets. 
But the majority of the tribe were half naked, and in 
a condition of squalid filth. One of the squaws en- 

13 



194 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

tered a grocery store with a baby bound to her back, 
and a greasy blanket over all. In her hand she held 
some pieces of deer-skin work for barter. Her eye 
wandered with a savage restlessness over the shelves, 
and fell to an open barrel of brown sugar. An Arra- 
pahoe can no more resist sugar than a wasp. Mrs. Lo 
uttered a guttural of exultation, thrust the deer-skin 
into the grocer's hands, whipped the baby out of his 
pouch in a jiffy, cast her blanket on the floor, and 
after throwing into the middle of it all the sugar she 
could scoop before the grocer cried, " Hold ! " tied it 
up composedly by the corners, hung it over one arm 
and her offspring over the other, marching out of the 
store with all the dignity of Penthesilea, and consid- 
erably fewer clothes than that royal Amazon wore 
on public occasions ; in other words, nothing but a 
breech-cloth. 

Towards nightfall might occasionally be seen a 
stalwart brave stalking out of ihe town towards the 
encampment, metaphorically speaking with his hands 
in his pockets, and a high-bred insolence in his car- 
riage, followed by a trail of wives laden with babies 
and the day's shopping of the family. I was about 
to utter a sneer at the cruelty of savage life, when a 
question occurred to me whether women still carry 
the heaviest burdens in our own civilized society. 
Here is Mrs. Lo stumbling under twenty pounds of 
sugar and young Indian ; but I have known white 
wives who had loads to carry for their lords some- 
thing heavier and far less sweet. 

On the 23d of June, two of us resumed our jour- 
ney toward California, by the Overland wagon. The 
other two stayed behind to visit friends who had in- 
troduced Eastern farming to a well timbered tract 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 195 

of low bottom land on the Platte, near Denver. Our 
party was to reunite at Salt Lake or at some inter- 
mediate station. 

Nothing noticeable occurred on the road to Latham 
to change the moonlight impression of it which I have 
heretofore given, with the exception of Arrapahoe In- 
dians. They were on their way southward, and those 
we had seen in or around Denver were the mere 
skirmish line of the tribe. For the first forty miles 
out of Denver, we were perpetually meeting parties 
of them on horseback, or encamped under black skin 
tents resembling the Sibley, and having quite an im- 
proved style of egress at the apex of the cone for 
the smoke, which among some tribes has no means of 
exit but the front slit. They made no hostile signs, 
being for the present on their summer tour, and not 
their war-path ; but I could not help thinking of them, 
as I have among lunatics in an asylum, or wild beasts 
in a menagerie, how little they knew their power, or 
how to exercise it. There were enough of them to 
have swept away every vestige of civilization between 
Latham and Pike's Peak. The puniest woman who 
could wield my Ballard's carbine was a match for ten 
of them. 

"We found tents pitched near several of the stations 
where we stopped to change horses, and took advan- 
tage of the halt to push our acquaintance with the 
Arrapahoes. I was particularly anxious to see the 
noble Indian. When a boy, I read everything that 
was ever written about him. At that time of life, I 
regarded him as a sort of every-day Alexander the 
Great, slightly tinctured with Damon and Pythias. 
He principally followed burning himself at stakes, — 
rather liked it than otherwise, — so much so that he 



196 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

was in the habit of requesting to be allowed to sug- 
gest whether hot pinchers would not be a neater 
method of ending the job. In his intervals of ennui, 
he did the lecture business on a free basis, visiting 
public lyceums known by the descriptive title of pow- 
wows, and affording much satisfaction to audiences, 
chiefly on the themes of " the Bounding Deer " and 
" the Blasted Pine." He was a poet, an orator, a 
prophet, a hero, a highly educated and accomplished 
gentleman, who, from native simplicity of character, 
went without his clothes on. The only screw loose 
in his whole construction was an unaccountable pro- 
pensity to die off. This was called " fading before 
the advance of the cruel white man." When I 
thought of it, I felt ashamed of being white; I be- 
longed to a cruel race that "advanced;" I wished 
that the cruel race would only listen to the good 
people who disliked " advancing," and consent to 
stop it. As for the female Indian, there was a pe- 
riod when I pined for her. I owe her many melan- 
choly months between the ages of nine and twelve. 
I remained faithfuler to my ideal than my ideal 
proved to me. I remember what a solace Beadle's 
Dime Novels would have been to me then, just as I 
think how much better off I might have been, had 
chloroform only been invented when I had my first 
tooth out. " Wishky-Washky, or the Queen of the 
Pottowatomies," would have served me for one good 
dose. As it was, I read Cooper cumulatively to get 
the same effect. Every Indian woman was beautiful. 
All you had to do to equal the Venus de Medici was 
to turn the color of a new cent. The Indian woman 
lived principally on shady banks, with her feet in the 
water ; but the same guilelessness of character which 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 197 

obviated a tailor's bill for her brother, guaranteed 
her against colds in the head. She was as pretty as 
anybody could be who was so pious ; more pious 
than any white girl half so pretty. She contemplated 
alternately the Great Spirit in the clouds, and her own 
lovely face in the pool. If the half that was told of 
her was true, she could not be accused of wasting her 
time. How I longed to see her ! I thought of her 
whenever I was in a grove. Would she steal out 
from behind that old chestnut, give me one quick an- 
telope-look with the meltingest black eyes in Pagan- 
dom, and, laughing like the woodrobin's gurgle, be 
away again among the invisible Dryads and Fauns ? 
Ah, bright Alfaratta, you jilted me ! You are a swin- 
dle, bright Alfaratta ! I don't like to say it to a lady, 
but you are, Alfaratta ; you know you are. 

I am obliged to disbelieve in the existence of a beau- 
tiful full-blooded Indian woman. I know that many 
excellent men, writing at a distance from Indians, 
have warmly imaged such a fact, and that a very few 
other excellent men, who have known Indians at 
home, speak enthusiastically of it. We must remem- 
ber that almost any woman seems beautiful to a man 
who has seen none for three months, as often hap- 
pened to the old voyageurs ; also that the poet is quite 
independent of facts. A priori it would be possible to 
disprove a beautiful Indian. Neither in the physical, 
mental, or moral training of the Indian woman exist 
any of those conditions which underlie female beauty. 
She is man's drudge, and shows it in her face. Her 
husband can sell her or let her : she knows it, and 
shows that. She is ill fed, badly clothed, depressed by 
too rapid child-bearing ; she shows from head to foot 
that she is all of these, or that her mother was before 



198 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

her. It is a manifest impossibility for physical beauty 
to exist under such circumstances by the operation 
of any known law. As to studying the question by 
observation, I can only say that I have looked in vain, 
through all that part of the Continent we traversed, 
for a single instance of anything which the utmost 
lenience could pronounce beauty in an Indian woman. 
Nothing can be a greater mistake than the popular no- 
tions regarding Indian maternity; the getting and 
rearing of a family break them down, and age them in 
their prime, to an extent more deplorable than among 
our frailest American women. Their health is poisoned 
by a congenital taint (which some philosophers have 
insisted in foisting upon the whites, but which is as 
independent of them as death itself) ; their habits are 
too slovenly to mention ; their digestion quivers be- 
tween gorge and fast; they become inured to the cold 
at the expense of stinted limbs, narrow chest, pro- 
truding abdomens, and a skin with the texture of 
rawhide. The assertions of the last sentence apply 
equally to the men. It would be hard for an imagi- 
native artist to give an exaggerated idea of the 
extent to which the Arrapahoes carry the spindle- 
shanked and pot-bellied style of human architecture. 
The little children all seem consumed by iahes mesen- 
terica. For one boy of six I could find no simile but 
a kettle-drum standing on two fifes, with the bulge 
forward. Most of the men were gaunt ; many under- 
sized; nearly all were shrunken in the calf; and I 
saw none whose development in any way would have 
attracted notice in an Eastern gymnasium. They 
gave me the impression of a race on the decompos- 
ing grade, and a good way down the scale. Their 
faces were, without exception, gross, brutal, selfish, 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 199 

and sullen. Their occasional scanty laugh was a bad 
laugh. There was no suspicion even of prettiness in 
the face or form of either man, woman, or child. 

The horses of the Arrapahoes and their appreciation 
of them formed their one strong point. Few of the 
wiry little animals were larger than a Kanuck pony ; 
they were all of them ewe-necked, as is inevitable 
with pasture-feeders ; here and there was a tympan- 
itic little cob which seemed to have succumbed to the 
surrounding human contagion, and become pot-bellied 
out of complaisance ; but their action was good, their 
color picturesquely patched and pied, their eyes in- 
telligent, their training such that they were ridden 
without bridle (often without saddle either), guided 
only by a pat on the neck, and their bottom evi- 
dently immense. I felt some respect for a large war- 
rior on thin legs who refused our offer of one hun- 
dred dollars for his stallion. 

On one of these little fellows I saw a boy and a 
girl riding, with their little brother between them, the 
pony trotting away with as much comfort as if he 
were carrying an empty sack. I think he would not 
have objected if they had put him under a pyramid 
of the entire family. It is certainly in the Indian's 
favor that he belongs to one of the few races which 
make their horse their friend. An Arrapahoe baby 
takes much the same line of familiarities with his fa- 
ther's horse that a white child indulges towards his 
sister's poodle. An Indian horse hardly ever comes 
vicious to the stable of his first white owner. Not 
until the cruel bit has been substituted for the gentle 
hand-pat, and he has heard himself addressed in the 
new voice of enmity, does he learn to bite, kick, or 
practice the still worse vice of bucking. It is a pity 



200 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

that civilized nations should be compelled to learn 
the perfection of one of the manliest arts from the 
Nomads of Tartary, the Plains, and the Arabian Desert. 
The horse is as capable of friendship as the dog. The 
more that I see of him, the more I love his nature, 
and the more am I convinced that the true side for 
the trainer to approach him on, is his personal devo- 
tion to himself. The horse that cannot be approached 
thus, by wisdom and patience, I have yet to see. 

The nearest approach to luxury among the Arrapa- 
hoes was a sort of horse-palanquin, made by suspend- 
ing a hammock of skins between two of the lodge- 
poles, which are tied at one end to the horse's neck, 
when the tents are struck for a march. The other 
ends of the poles drag on the ground; and they pos- 
sess sufficient elasticity to make the hammock no 
mean ambulance for a veteran or a sick person. 

A little before sunset we pulled up at the one house 
and the stables representing Latham. Here we took 
tea from our own supply chest, and passed the time 
waiting for the westward stage in sketching and bot- 
anizing before dark, and writing letters after it. The 
stage arrived about ten o'clock, and to our great sat- 
isfaction we discovered only three inside passengers 
intending to go further. Night-riding in a stage is 
an occasion where misery decidedly does not love 
company. 

Just after leaving Latham, we coiled ourselves into 
one corner for a nap, but had hardly began to nod 
before we plunged down a steep bank, and began 
fording the South Platte at a point where the water 
came just nicely over the floor of the wagon, soaking 
our boots, gun-cases, and blankets to perfection. The 
night was dark ; but, to judge by feeling, the road 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 201 

during the first half of the night continued nearly as 
level as from Fremont's Orchard to Latham. We 
dozed up the steep grades, and got rattled wide awake 
down them, coming feverishly into the dawn during 
our first severely mountainous climb, along the bed 
of the Cache-la-Poudre. This stream is one of the 
most beautiful mountain torrents which we saw on 
our entire journey. It comes from the everlasting 
snow4ine of the peaks about Cheyenne Pass ; and its 
entire course to the Platte is a roaring sluice, broken 
by no great fall, but obstructed by gigantic boulders, 
with a tolerably even grade and considerable winding 
of direction. At Camp Halleck, where we arrived at 
sunrise, the stream was about thirty yards wide, and 
plunged through a densely tangled forest. The sol- 
diers encamped at this station were a detachment of 
Colorado volunteers, sent out to watch the Utes and 
Snakes. I envied them their trout-fishing. The Cache- 
la-Poudre swarms with fine fish, and is the most mys- 
teriously seductive of streams to an artist. We should 
have been glad to trace it up to the top of its canon, 
but turned off its course shortly after leaving Camp 
Halleck, and ascended to a new level. 

We now began to understand the significance of the 
title Rocky Mountains. We had reached a minor pla- 
teau between the snow-ridges, where the granite and 
sandstone outcrops projected from fifty to three hun- 
dred feet above the general sandy level, bare and 
perpendicular as the side of a house, varied by rolling 
buttes or ridges of similar height, thinly tufted with 
the gray grammargrass, and dotted with clumps of 
sage brush. This was the first place where sage, so 
called (though I believe it is properly an artemisia), 
becomes the prominent feature of the Overland land- 



202 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

scape, though it occurs previously at intervals all the 
way from Denver, and other wormwoods abound on 
the Plains much further east. The sage rises from a 
tough gnarled root in a number of spiral shoots which 
finally twist together into a single trunk, varying in 
circumference from six inches to two feet, and tena- 
cious as a hawser. The leaves of the plant are gray, 
woolly, and crisp, with a strong offensive smell, re- 
sembling true sage. From Camp Halleck to the Wa- 
satch, almost the only vegetable life not distinctly 
arborescent greets the traveller's eye in the shape of 
limitless wastes abandoned to this scrubby sage, and 
the equally scrubby but somewhat greener " grease- 
wood." For long stages between the high timbered 
snow-ridges, the only resource for fuel on which the 
emigrant can rely while following the Rocky Moun- 
tain trail, is this pair of dry, resinous shrubs; and they 
burn so freely as to be a great improvement on the 
method of boiling his kettle over dry buffalo drop- 
pings, which he was compelled to adopt on some level 
stretches of the Plains. 

Where the sage was lacking, the plateau to which 
we had climbed from Camp Halleck was a mere clean 
skeleton of the world. Telescopes reveal to us a very 
similar tract in the moon, and geology takes us back 
to a time when the earth was all thus. I think that 
the man who stands where we rode on the 24th 
of June, need never be without a tolerably correct 
idea of the azoic period, nor use a glass to see the 
Lunar Desert. We might have been visiting this 
sphere by some magical anachronism before the first 
river flowed, or sea felt tidal fluctuation; when as 
yet there had been neither Ganoid, nor Euripterus, 
nor Trilobite. When we descended into a depression 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 203 

of the plateau, there was nothing but pure rock be- 
tween us and the horizon. Vast stones lay heaped up 
into pyramids as if they had been rained from the 
sky. Cubical masses, each covering an acre of surface 
and rising to a perpendicular height of thirty or forty 
feet, appeared in strange series about a rude square, 
irresistibly suggesting the buttresses of some gigantic 
palace or prison whose superstructure had crumbled 
away with the race of its Titanic builders. The most 
remarkable instance of geologic record which I ever 
saw or heard of, occurred in a vast rectangular pile 
of altered red sandstone, which we encountered on 
this tract. It was a mass nearly the eighth of a mile 
in circuit, and stood nearly four-square to the height 
of a hundred feet or more above a basin of water- 
washed pebbles. It was a pile as entirely isolated as 
the dome of St. Peter's, yet on its eastern face it bore 
the unmistakable signs of having once formed the 
wall of a mighty cataract. Its upper horizontal edge 
was channeled in polished grooves; its face was 
broken into ledges, and the angles of these worn again 
to curves ; there were pot-holes on the top of the 
rock, and gravel strewn with boulders lining the con- 
ical basin at its foot ; in fact, to one standing on the 
eastern side of the rock, there appeared every condi- 
tion requisite for a Niagara, except the water. That 
was nowhere within sight or credibility. A poet 
might have fancied that he heard it; that it was an in- 
visible fall, a ghost of some Old World torrent which 
roared gently as 'twere any sucking dove to the vul- 
gar, but had rhythm and thunder for the ears which 
can hear the spheres sing. To scientific eyes it was 
such a wonder as the- Niagara precipice might be if a 
cube of its present mass were cut away from the rest 



204 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of the world on the American and Canada side and at 
the upper end of Goat Island, the surrounding coun- 
try leveled to the plane of the lower river, and the 
water led by some far distant channel to the St. Law- 
rence. The man who, ten centuries afterward, looked 
on the scarred dry precipice resulting from such a 
process, beheld the deep furrows of the brink, counted 
the slippery shelves beneath it, yet heard no voice of 
water break the desert silence, would experience 
some such sensation as I did on beholding that Rocky 
Mountain stone-pile. Where did the water come 
from ? Where were the successive terraces, where the 
cradling canon by which the mighty freshets hurled 
themselves down from the snows to grind this silex 
into sand or crack it into ledges ? To leap this wall 
with the force recorded, the water must have de- 
scended a succession of steep grades towering far 
above the precipice. Every vestige of such forma- 
tions has been moved out of the way by some colossal 
agency, and one might as well look for a cataract 
from the roof of a house. Yet here stands the unan- 
swerable record, — a witness which has survived cata- 
clysm, — a monument, compared with which the Pyra- 
mids were things of yesterday, to a cataract whose 
very bed had departed, like its vapor, from the face 
of the modern world. 

Another curious formation of this plateau was an 
uphft of trap-rock in the neighborhood of the sand- 
stone cataract, taking the form of a colossal steam- 
ship, much keeled to leeward, and rising the crest of a 
lofty billow of sandstone. At the distance of forty 
yards, the illusion was absolutely startling. We could 
see a handsome clean cut-water, a clipper bow, a main- 
mast broken off short at the cross-trees, a battered 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 205 

funnel, a hatcli with its cover and combings, a pilot- 
house and a bowsprit, with a fragment of the jib- 
boom. Everything was made out with such mimetic 
distinctness that we seemed to be looking at some 
petrifaction where a ship, suddenly transformed to 
basalt, was foundering in a sea of sandstone. 

I have mentioned only the two most important of 
many remarkable uplifts, simulating every variety of 
artificial object that is conceivable of execution in 
stone. The human face and figure seemed among 
Nature's most favorite subjects for burlesque. In 
all the wonderful suggestions of Dore's " Wandering 
Jew," there is nothing to compare with the frightful 
stone shapes and faces which occur on this plateau. 
On a bright sunny day like the one we spent in cross- 
ing it, the sensation of the traveller resembles a pleas- 
ant nightmare ; he feels that if he stayed a night in 
this wilderness of naked blocks, he would depart mad. 
The tract is landscape gone demoniacal. Yet even 
this is weak art compared with the sculptures of trap 
and sandstone further on toward Salt Lake. 

Ten miles of gradual climbing brought us out of 
this plateau to another region of rolling ridges, scan- 
tily timbered with cedar, and bearing a good crop of 
gramma grass. We found an occasional rivulet in 
the valleys, and strips of positive green along its 
course. Coming out of a quarry whose boundaries 
comprised a circuit of twenty miles, and whose blocks 
were hewn large enough to make a cathedral out of 
each cube, we breathed freer, and welcomed the sight 
of verdure like a balm. I had never understood be- 
fore the epic sublimity of that expression, " They 
shall pray that the mountains may fall on them," nor 
had I appreciated the horror of that Arabian Nights' 



206 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

talisman which enabled evil magicians to keep their 
victims under the granite floor of the world. There 
was not even the piteous relief of moss or lichen, 
no sprig of wormwood or cedar, no green lamina 
of any kind, on all those tremendous buttresses, and 
slabs, and effigies. The slabs might have been hot 
tiles on the roof of some impenetrable Dantesque 
hell ; the buttresses waited for another story to the 
prison which should build itself to heaven ; the effi- 
gies were devil-sentries guarding the ramparts. No 
picture can be on a scale sufficiently large to give 
any idea of the effect produced by these formations 
on an eye-witness. Almost everybody of Oriental 
propensities has formed to himself some notion of 
the way Domdaniel, Vathek, and Aladdin caverns 
might be expected to look. But if any such person, 
of however vivid fancy, will pass from the head of 
the Cache la Poudre to Virginia Dale, without con- 
fessing that his most ambitious ideals have been 
utterly surpassed, and his mind fairly confounded, by 
the hard realities of trap and sandstone, I will be 
sure that I have not been modest in estimating other 
men's imagination by my own. 

Between a series of perpendicular sandstone uplifts 
from two to five hundred feet high, and descending 
again to another green valley level, we reached Vir- 
ginia Dale about noon. We had grown so fascinated 
with the scenery since daybreak that we resolved to 
leave the stage, and stop over till the next day. I do 
not know whether I have heretofore more than infer- 
entially mentioned how great a convenience we found 
the Overland Company's license, always granted their 
travellers, to lie by whenever and as long as we pleased, 
without invahdating the contract for through passage. 



INTO THE EOCKY MOUNTAINS. 207 

"We had only to mark on our large baggage the address 
in Salt Lake City where it should be left to await us, 
and take our minor traps, such as guns, artists' ma- 
terialj blankets, and small stores, into camp or ranch 
with us till we resumed our route. By stopping at 
Virginia Dale, we should give the remaining two of 
our party a chance to catch up with us, and have 
a better opportunity for sidewise explorations than 
might again be afforded us in the heart of the Rocky 
Mountain system. 

The Virginia Dale Station is 752 miles from Atchi- 
son, and about 1300 from San Francisco. It is situ- 
ated in a continuation of that lofty furrow of the 
range known as the Cheyenne Pass. A log-ranch 
and stables constitute the entire station. Beyond 
the buildings southerly, a mountain stream winds 
into a dense forest. Across the Overland trail, north 
of the house, rises a congeries of round gray moun- 
tains fifteen hundred feet in average height from the 
trail level, packed together in such close order that 
they resembled a school of porpoises coming up to 
breathe. Just below the house to the eastward, a 
little rivulet sang its way round coquettish curves to 
the large trout-stream in the far jungle, through a 
meadow golden green in patches where the water 
eddied back and the sun fell directly. We were told 
that trout swarmed within five miles of us ; but there 
was not force enough at the station to spare us guides 
or escort, and we had moreover but little desire to 
catch fish when our finest crops of hterary and ar- 
tistic hay ought to be making. We were indebted 
for an unusually comfortable reception at Virginia 
Dale (not to speak here of other places) to the kind 
thoughtfulness of Mr. Otis, the Overland Road super- 



208 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

intendent. We called on him at Denver with letters 
from his brother, the well known artist, author, and 
physician, our friend Doctor Fessenden N. Otis of 
New York ; found him absent on the line, left the 
notes for him, and never afterwards were fortunate 
enough to meet him personally. Just as we resumed 
our route from Denver, a very pleasant letter of in- 
formation and guidance was put into our hands ; and 
we were not only instructed how to find the best 
things, but enabled to enjoy them comfortably by 
still another letter from Mr. Otis, addressed to all the 
employees of the road, enjoining them to grant us 
every facility for stopping to sketch or geologize 
which did not involve exorbitant delay of the mail, 
and to treat us, in every respect of fare and accom- 
modations, as his personal friends. This courtesy on 
his part was so liberal and hearty, and showed such 
warm appreciation of our objects, that we were more 
surprised than we need to have been after knowing 
another member of his family. 

At Virginia Dale we drew this kindly document 
for the first time, and presented it at the station- 
keeper, who instantly surrendered us the best bed he 
had in the house, with the exception of his own, and 
assured us we might have had that if his wife were 
not then sick on it with a violent intermittent fever. 
I could not imagine where a person could contract 
such a disease in this region, and found that it be- 
longed to those rare cases which get settled in some 
one of the Western States too deeply to be cured at 
once by the Rocky Mountains. Poor little wife! 
What a terrible distance from everything to have 
chills and fever ! I caught a single glimpse of the 
patient as her husband passed into the sick-room, 



INTO THE EOCKY MOUNTAINS. 209 

and saw, through all the expression of suffering which 
her face wore, a delicate, refined prettiness most un- 
expected in this savage wilderness. Love, however, 
seemed to make that tract bloom in the teeth of 
ague. I never saw a man kinder to his wife than the 
station-keeper. He was obliged, in her default, to 
manage every detail of housekeeping ; and conjugal 
fidelity raised him to the level of the occasion. I do 
not believe the skillfullest artist could scour a pan to 
begin with that unaccustomed male who learned it 
yesterday for his wife's sake. His success in the 
initial batch of tea-biscuit I regard explicable on the 
ground of inspiration. Confiding and clinging to the 
last, like all our sex, he took in the dough to be in- 
spected by the invalid, who entertained an indulgent 
spirit toward it, and relieved him from apprehensions. 
He was not afraid of it any more, but put it in the 
oven, and stayed by it with no one else near him, .till 
it came out a triumphant straw-color, and tasted less 
like equal quantities of lard and potash than any 
Rocky Mountain tea-cake which I ever approached 
with a consciousness of my imminent peril. But to 
see the station-keeper in his great dish-washing act 
was to witness the favorite spectacle of the gods, — 
a good man struggling under difficulties. A trifle 
redder in the face, but feeling morally developed, he 
came out of Destiny and the Dish-kettle without a 
nick in any of his crockery, left no grease-streaks 
when he wiped the plates, and lived fully up to his 
privileges in the fidelity with which he washed out 
the dish-cloth. 

Beside this excellent man and his wife, there lived 
in the house a pair of stable-helpers and such drivers 
as stopped there transiently during ofi^hours. With 

14 



210 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

these lodgers we were to share one of the three 
apartments into which the house was divided. 

After dinner, (which in admiration of the station- 
man's great qualities, we cooked for ourselves), we set 
out to explore the porpoise-back mountains which 
rolled away to the northward of the road. We had 
under-estimated their height at starting, and found 
that the climb to their highest cone took us a full 
hour. Our way led along the upper course of the 
brook, which waters the meadow before the ranch, to 
a series of deep rifts or canons channeled in the side 
of the mountains by freshets at the season of snow- 
melting, but now dry as ashes, and paved with enor- 
mous boulders. Up the steep incline of one of these 
canon bottoms, and under the shade of occasional 
maples or aspens which still throve along the slopes 
on memories of last spring's moisture, we clambered 
to the bald gray top of the mountain. We were 
rewarded by a fine bird's-eye view of the country 
traversed since sunrise, and immediately below us 
stretched delicious green bottom lands watered by a 
third mountain brook. Everywhere our • horizon is 
bounded by snow-peaks. We stand at the summit of 
mountain piled on mountain, but yonder are colossal 
ridges which look down measurelessly far to laugh at 
us. Still further on rise peaks as much higher than 
they as they than we, or we than Denver. As 
for matters right under foot, we find, in the first 
place, that these round mountains are a formation 
of flesh-colored granite, largely feldspathic, and ex- 
isting, wherever it outcrops to the weather, in a state 
as friable and incoherent as the softest pudding-stone. 
This was the locality in which, as I have heretofore 
mentioned, I kicked several large boulders entirely 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 211 

to pieces in a few minutes, leaving a mere gravel-bed 
of crystals. Wherever a granite mass outcropped 
above the thin sand and gramma, I observed that its 
form followed the same haystack or mushroom con- 
tour presented by the mountains themselves. Several 
of the outcrops were very narrow in proportion to 
their heights, standing in round- topped pillars five 
or six feet high, with nearly the proportions of a 
Bologna sausage. The merest tap shook them down. 
From the similarity of their forms, I inferred that the 
mountains, as well as the minor outcrops, were masses 
of rotten granite which had been weathered into a 
spheroidal surface, though I had never before im- 
agined the rock occurring in such quantity so com- 
pletely decomposed. Several Eocky Mountain hares, 
a distant herd of antelope, a young elk, and a villain- 
ous looking gray wolf, who slunk on seeing us into 
the indistinctness of the similarly hued sage-brush, 
were the quadrupeds who came into our field ; we 
saw several mourning-doves and plovers ; and, coming 
down into the valley again, made unavailing search 
along the brook for a wonderful " fish with hands," 
which the stable-boys had seen there, and which, from 
their poetical description, we hoped might be a new 
species of siren, or some other equally interesting 
amphibian. 

The next day, our friends came along in the stage, 
and we rejoined them. Our road for the next fifteen 
miles traversed an undulating tract like that between 
the stony plateau and Virginia Dale, tolerably green 
and well watered from the snow-peaks. As we pro- 
ceeded, the undulations became lower, and presently 
merged into the magnificent level of the Laramie 
Plains. This is one of the world's largest and loftiest 



212 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

intra-montane plateaus. It occupies a surface of 
about fifty miles square ; is as smooth as an Illinois 
prairie ; and the sensation of finding such a lowland 
tract at the height of eight thousand feet in the air, 
is a bewilderment to all one's previous notions of 
physical geography. The plateau is an alluvial de- 
posit, belonging, so far as I could learn from a per- 
pendicular section on the west bank of Big Laramie 
River, to the late tertiary. This appeared to consist 
of alternating white and yellow strise, representing 
two varieties of silt, the former almost purely cre- 
taceous, the latter partly so, but mostly composed of 
alumina with a tinge of red oxide of iron or chro- 
mium. I nowhere noticed an outcrop of rocks be- 
longing to the mountain system. The grass was 
nearly as luxuriant and green as a New England 
June meadow. Its level in the general view seemed 
uniform as the sea; and such special deviations as oc- 
curred here and there, were not of the ordinary roll- 
ing contour proper to the Plains, but rather seemed 
terrace formations. To understand the strangeness 
of such a landscape in such a position, it must be 
remembered that this vast plain not only stands at 
an elevation of eight thousand feet, but is walled on 
all sides by mountains nearly as much higher than 
itself Just as we enter the Plain by its eastern 
boundary coming from Cheyenne Pass, we catch a 
glorious glimpse of the Laramie Butte, its snow shin- 
ing like a white-hot mass in the dazzling sunlight ; 
its form almost a perfect cone, its height rated 
among the loftiest snow-peaks of the range. It 
stands as a sort of northeastern bastion to the enor- 
mous square, and from it, westward, lead the giant 
ramparts of the Wind River range, with an occar 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 213 

sional snow-crowned turret, towards Fremont's and 
Lander's Peaks. On the southern side of the plateau, 
in a direction nearly parallel to the Wind River chain, 
runs a long black range of rolUng mountains, three or 
four thousand feet high above the Plains level, bare as 
the bumps on a phrenologist's cast, and possessing the 
rounded contour which I had found associated with 
rotten granite. Behind us the square is almost closed 
by the time we reach the lowest bottom, through the 
intervention of those crags and cones we have left 
around Virginia Dale. To the due westward rises a 
succession of rugged granite stairs climbing up to the 
mighty Medicine Bow Mountains, under whose snows 
we shall shiver to-morrow; and from the middle of 
the Plains, through a gap at the southwestern corner 
of our bounding walls, we get the most ravishing view 
of distant snow-ranges that was ever vouchsafed Na- 
ture's lover in this world. I have seen many isolated 
peaks which surpassed those of this particular view, 
but I never in my life imagined equal beauty in a 
range itself These mountains belonged to the Uin- 
tah system, another transverse range like the Wind 
River, running from Green River, near the 109th 
parallel of longitude, to inosculate with the Wahsat^h C4 
rang-e near Utah Lake. This was our first view of ' 

o 

Mormondom ; and I could not wonder that when that 
strange company of enthusiasts, led by Brigharh 
Young, caught such a glimpse as this of the land 
beyond them, they were filled with an ecstasy which 
spent itself in prayers, dreams, and prophesyings. 
I can think of no resemblance for it, save my childish 
impressions of an old steel engraving, called "The 
Mount of God." Mature taste may condemn such 
prints with the nightmares of Fuseli and the resurrec- 



214 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

tions of Martin ; but my propensity for the marvelous 
was too much gratified to let me be critical. So was 
it here. The view was not explicable by the ordinary 
ideals of terrestrial scenery ; it was a fairy phantasm, 
a floating cloud, a beatific dream of paradisaical 
ranges, let down out of heaven, not builded out of 
earth. The sunlight fell on it out of a spotless sky ; 
every square inch of the range received its maximum 
of illumination, so that its shadows were only less 
relieved against greater lights, and seemed spots of 
vague turquoise, sapphire, or pale amethyst on a float- 
ing mist of diamond or opal vapor. These gross com- 
parisons come as near the impression as words of 
mine can ; but my reader must take a step in ideal- 
ism for himself, and imagine all these gems glorified 
by distance into the spirits of themselves. The near- 
est peaks of the Uintah were at least a hundred 
miles from us, and rose from a lower level than our- 
selves ; yet none of us needed to be told that they 
were among the grandest of the whole Cordillera. 
They vindicated themselves to the kingly title by 
the ermine of snow and the diamonds of ice, together 
making them one continuous splendor half way from 
foot to crest. 

Our way lay across the southern third of the level. 
On each side of us the grass was luxuriant, and every- 
where a nearer approach to Eastern meadows in its 
greenness than any of the herbage on the Plains 
proper. There were no settlements visible except at 
the stations ; and these consisted merely of the build- 
ings demanded by the road. We passed several large 
trains of cattle-wagons, all of them belonging to 
Gentile emigrants (the Mormon trains preferring the 
northern or Laramie route) ; and in one place, where 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 215 

they had halted for the day, the camp, with its snowy 
wagon-tilts, its leaping fires, its picturesque back- 
woodsmen, women, and children, and the oxen brows- 
ing or lying down in the sweet thick grass, made a 
very pretty spectacle. 

The Indian still has free range over this delightful 
plain. The antelope abounds on it ; every variety of 
grouse found in the range is plenty here ; deer, bear, 
and elk are numerous in the fastnesses of the sur- 
rounding mountains ; and so long as the sun shines 
warm, no tract can be a better antetype of the In- 
dians' happy hunting-grounds. As if in recognition 
of this likeness, the tribes had here and there on the 
plain erected curious mausoleums for their departed 
braves, consisting of a high pole-staging, upon which 
the dead lay, wrapped in his blankets in the open air. 
In no case where we passed these strange monuments 
were we offended by odors of decomposition. This 
fact is one of the strongest illustrations of the char- 
acter of the Rocky Mountain atmosphere, and espe- 
cially of that part of it which floats dissolved with 
the purest sunlight over Laramie Plains. The air is 
different from that on the eastern slope of the Appala- 
chians very much in the same kind that muriatic acid 
differs from muriate of ammonia. Muriate of ammo- 
nia contains acid which has been satisfied : the air 
contains oxygen in its passive state. There are some 
localities in the mountains where the ozone tests fail 
of a discovery for months at a time ; throughout the 
mountains, and a distance of many miles eastward on 
the Plains, iron lies out-of-doors a year at a time 
without perceptible rusting ; such consumptives as 
come to this region, and settle no higher up the range 
than they can preserve their ease of respiration, find 



216 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

their disease remarkably retarded. There are several 
theories looking toward an explanation of the passive 
oxygen accumulated toward the centre of the Conti- 
nent. It has been found that the air interpolated be- 
tween water globules contains a much higher per cent, 
of active oxygen. The vapor of the sea-board, on its 
way towards the Rocky Mountains, undergoes pro- 
gressive condensation upon every eminence, alternat- 
ing with rarefaction over every heated plain. Both 
the water that ascends into the higher stratum of 
clouds to be wafted westward for final condensation 
on the loftiest snow-peaks of the Rocky range, and 
that which falls in showers between the Appalachians, 
or the Gulf margin and the rainless regions of the 
Platte, contain between their globules a large per 
cent, of all the ozonized air which they have met 
in their passage through the atmosphere. Thus in 
either case, whether the ozone goes entangled with 
the water into the soil or the supra-human regions of 
the atmosphere, all the middle space occupied by the 
range and its neighboring plains has suffered a defil- 
tration of its ozone. If this view of mine be correct, 
we may naturally look for a powerfully ozonized at- 
mosphere on the highest peaks of the Rocky Moun- 
tains. Another theory suggests that the ozone of 
the sea-board atmosphere is only an allotropic condi- 
tion of all the oxygen present resulting from the 
decomposition of sea- water, electrical currents created 
by the friction of dry and wet air, or from both, and 
that with the removal of these conditions, as by trans- 
portation inland, the oxygen returns to its passive, 
and, on this hypothesis, its normal state. I prefer the 
former view, as consistent with the experiments of 
Schonbein and his theory of the duplex constitution 
of aerial oxygen by a plus and a mmus element. 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 217 

However we may philosophize about it, the fact is 
there. All the processes of Nature, which require 
abundance of active oxygen, are retarded, or even in 
some cases nearly arrested, in the Plains and the Rocky 
Mountain region below the snow limits. Tuberculous 
disease necessitates the oxidation of a larger amount 
of tissue than the digestion can replace. On reaching 
Colorado, the patient finds the equilibrium between 
waste and reparation partially restored, by what we 
may call the pacification of his inhaled oxygen ; the 
tuberculous deposits are arrested at their present 
stage, the immature remaining nearly stationary, and 
the mature cicatrizing after a fashion which some- 
times quite surprises the Eastern practitioner. This is 
not the place to inquire how far the unhealthy prod- 
ucts of a strumous diathesis may accumulate else- 
where after they cease to be consumed in the lungs. 
As it is the oxidation rather than the accumulation 
which leads directly to a mortal result in such cases, 
when we have retarded oxidation we have lengthened 
life. To the consumptive patient, who has a particu- 
lar interest in living as long as possible, the climate 
of Colorado offers one of the finest sanitaria in the 
world. This will be one of the leading advantages of 
the Territory as soon as our Pacific Railroad has made 
Denver accessible to invalids. I hope, before many 
years have elapsed, to see some of the pleasantest 
sites on the foot-hills between Denver and the Arkan- 
sas occupied by institutions for the accommodation 
and treatment of patients attacked by pulmonary 
diseases in the East. When the Parks become attain- 
able by any ordinary means of transport, they may 
form territory for the regeneration of the race in this 
particular ; scrofula dying out of the blood of succes- 



218 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

sive generations reared here, until it shall be impossi- 
ble to find a baby with the least congenital taint. To 
be sure, the Indians are decaying away over this iden- 
tical tract; but their scourge is a worse one than sim- 
ple scrofula, being none other than scrofula's worst 
and most invincible parent. 

As a mere selfish matter, apart from the obvious 
humanitarian motives which I never yet found it 
necessary to urge upon any true member of the noble 
profession of medicine, I should strongly advise the 
physician whose studies had been specially directed 
toward pulmonary disease, if he wished to make him- 
self a name and a fortune, to open a house for the 
reception of consumptives either at Denver or Colo- 
rado City. At the latter spot he might still further 
enlarge the sphere of his institution, by receiving the 
classes of patients in whose cases the various Fontaine 
qui Bouille waters can be employed with benefit. 

To return to the Laramie Plains. This vast level 
has an interest beside its vernal beauty of herbage : 
its grand entourage of mountains; the exhilarating 
elixir of its air, which bears infallible evidence of 
coming fresh from the alembic, virgin from all lungs 
except one's own; the glorious glimpses of the snow- 
peaks toward Quien Hornet, and the far ghost of 
white-robed Laramie. The plain is one of those nodal 
points in the physical geography of the Continent 
which must always form the most engrossing objects 
of research to the catholic student or far-sighted 
originator of national enterprise. "Where man can 
work with nature, he saves himself an immense deal of 
drudgery. When he discovers the natural system of 
communications on a continent, he possesses knowl- 
edge of the highest possible use to him in running 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 219 

his own artificial lines with facility. The study of the 
natural system leads him directly to the perception 
of certain nodal points on the earth's surface, to hold 
which is to hold all the empire between them. Thus, 
if it be conceivable that any new Alexander should 
arise to struggle for universal empire, he would 
practically succeed (in the present state of artificial 
communication) when he had possessed himself of 
the Straits of Gibraltar, the Isthmus of Suez, the en- 
trance to the Red Sea, the isthmuses joining North 
and South America. Similarly the great passes and 
intra-montane plateaus of the Rocky range involve 
in their possession the power to dictate to New York 
and California upon many of their common matters, 
and the ability at will to unite them by the strongest 
ties of national cohesion, or eventually break up vital 
communication between them. The West side of the 
Continent is overwhelmingly loyal in its animus ; 
proud of the American Union and its own position in 
it. But the Pacific States will in time grow to be 
self-sufficient. They will grow, manufacture, import 
for themselves; and when that maturity arrives, the 
homogeneity of the two coasts will and should de- 
pend upon the degree of facility afforded to intercom- 
munication. So long as it remains a formidable 
undertaking to pass between New York and San 
Francisco, so long will there develop an independ- 
ence of interest and feeling which, however gradual 
and imperceptible, cannot fail to result in two dis- 
tinct nations. 

The value to the future statesman and engineer of 
such nodal points as we have mentioned, is well illus- 
trated by a description of the South Pass occurring in 
ex-Governor Gilpin's interesting book, "The Central 



220 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Gold Region." Laramie Plains are a level of similar 
interest. This level is a justification of the Spanish 
name of the system, — Sierra Madre, or Mother-Eange. 
It is one of a group of mothers occurring along the axis 
of the Range, out of whose loins come the grand riv- 
ers which irrigate the Continent. From the Plains of 
the South Pass, and the vast ranges on whose summit 
the plateau is upborne, flow the Missouri and the Yel- 
lowstone to the easterly ; the Snake, or principal fork 
of the Columbia, to the westward; and in a direction 
south by westerly the Green, or main branch of the 
Colorado River. Either by themselves or their canons 
and valleys, which radiate towards one common cen- 
tre in the Plains of the Pass, these rivers facilitate 
communication between the Mississippi and the Great 
Salt Lake basins, offering a series of nearly connected 
galleries or grades rather to the revision than to the 
reconstruction of the civil engineer. The Laramie 
Plains form another level, important for the same rea- 
sons, if not in the same degree. The level and its 
inclosing mountains form a reservoir for far less volu- 
minous and extensive streams than those rising out 
of the South Pass plateau, but offer better opportuni- 
ties for the study of the phenomena of the system 
than if their own were more complicated. The moun- 
tain mesa which has the Laramie Plains for its upper 
surface, is almost cinctured by the North Platte River. 
The South Platte has its origin in South Park ; its 
net-work of tributaries may almost be said to inoscu- 
late on the north side with those running into Middle 
Park for the formation of the Blue Fork of the Colo- 
rado ; the Blue Fork receives another system of trib- 
utaries running southerly from North Park, and this 
system again interpenetrates that of the tributaries 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 221 

running northward to compose the North Platte in 
the area of the same Park. Behind that grim range 
of bare, black mountains which form the southern 
wall of the Laramie Plateau, the North Platte is wind- 
ing in a general westerly direction out of the snow- 
peaks which nurture its infancy. Eighty miles west 
of the Laramie Plains summit level, it makes an ab- 
rupt bend to the north, and thence preserves this 
direction to the western butment of that noble range 
which forms the northern wall, taking in, near this 
corner, the Medicine Bow Creek, which has descended 
from a magnificent congeries of snow-peaks, to be 
climbed by us on the morrow, and has followed a 
higher terrace of the same slope as the North Platte 
across the entire west side of the mem. A step fur- 
ther on, the North Platte receives the Sweetwater 
from the west, and, passing around a bastion of the 
Wind River system, turns nearly due east to enter the 
lower Plains near Fort Laramie, receiving en route 
innumerable further tributaries, all of which rise from 
the north slope of the Wind River system, excepting 
the Laramie River itself This latter stream is formed 
by the junction of two forks, the Big and Little Lara- 
mie, both of which rise out of the Black Mountains, 
on the plateau's southern boundary, and traverse it 
completely from south to north, uniting nearly in its 
centre. 

A careful examination of the best Government 
maps of this region will enable the reader to follow 
this description, and get an idea of the contour of 
the Laramie mesa^ which may serve as the key to all 
other formations of the kind, including the Plains of 
South Pass and the three great parks south of Lara- 
mie. Upon such nodal points as these, all the internal 



222 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

river systems of the Continent are centred. Their 
contour and position are the important facts of the 
range to the theoretical, the all-important ones to the 
practical student of physical geography. 

Big and Little Laramie, where we crossed the Plain, 
flow nearly parallel and about fourteen miles apart. 
Their width, at the bridges maintained by the Over- 
land Route, is about thirty or forty yards. Their 
banks, but especially those of the latter branch, are 
enameled with flowers of a brilliancy unequaled, but 
of titles unknown in my experience. One variety 
was a scarlet vivid as flame, and at a distance resem- 
bled a salvia. The leguminacece were represented by 
several plants bearing the richest mauve and purple 
blossoms ; besides which I noticed some flowers seem- 
ingly allied to the larkspur, of a deep-blue shade, and 
sparingly interspersed among the profusion of the 
others. The sun was just on the western verge of 
the plateau as we reached Little Laramie ; and the 
effect of his level rays upon the exquisite cool ver- 
dure of the grass, with all these brilliant flowers 
dashed in for the high tones, was something out of 
which to manufacture peaceful memories for a life- 
time. 

During the next seventeen miles the ground grad- 
ually grew less even ; but the general characteristics 
of the plateau were preserved until twilight gave 
way to starlight, and we arrived at the station of 
Cooper's Creek. Here the moon rose, and revealed 
to us one of the loveliest little dells in all the Rocky 
Mountain scenery. Along the bottom of a shallow 
depression ran, crystal-clear and icy cold, a small 
stream, rising from the same Black range as the 
Laramie, and belonging to one of three classes which 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 223 

abound in this immediate vicinity : the streams which 
lose themselves upon the Plain in " sinks," or lakes 
without outlet ; those which penetrate the Black 
range to join the North Platte immediately; and 
those which flow thither indirectly, by emptying into 
Medicine Bow. For these three systems, the terrace 
including Cooper's Creek forms a nodal point on the 
small scale ; to which of them the creek belongs, I 
am not positive. We ate our supper from the box of 
private stores, sitting dappled with the moon-shadow 
of the luxuriant cotton-woods which embowered the 
creek ; and listening to its tuneful gurgling, or watch- 
ing the silver flash of ripples break across an umber 
pool of shade, we could have forgotten that this was 
not the end of our wanderings. 

The hoarse "All right!" of the driver startled us 
from our lotus margin. We had a great deal more 
before us ; so we arose to shake the crumbs from our 
beards, and the romance from our souls. We turned 
back one lingering glance at the paradise of Laramie 
Plains. Far off we heard the shrill yelp of the coyote ; 
and as far, a silver spark went shooting across the 
shadow of a grassy terrace, with that electric swift- 
ness which denotes the antelope. The whole great 
level was powdered with silvery mist. The moonlight 
seemed to lie on the nearer grass in silvery globules. 
Moonlight was tangled into the texture of the gross- 
est things. The ragged cotton-wood bark by the 
creek looked like strips of silver foil; the bleak 
station-house was soaked in a solution of romance, 
and might have been let for a palace to Rasselas; 
there was antiquity and a sort of Gothic strength 
about the company's stables ; while the very mules 
of the new relay seemed touched by the divinity of 



224 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the hour, and became hallowed, or moon-mellowed 
mules, who might have walked into the traces out of 
some old Italian " Flight into Egypt," or " Adoration 
of the Magi." 

With a sigh at turning our backs upon this lovely 
view, we drove across the creek, and immediately 
entered a rolling country. The transition between 
the general level of Laramie Plains and the intri- 
cately convoluted tract just west of Cooper's Creek, 
is almost as abrupt as the threshold of a door. The 
simple passage of a stream which does not wet our 
hubs, takes us at once into the view of an entirely 
new type of landscape. We are now, strictly speak- 
ing, out of the Laramie Plateau, and beginning to 
ascend toward Elk Mountain and the head of Med- 
icine Bow, by the foot-hills of the range including 
them. We were entering the extremity of the 
Black range, which had imperceptibly swung round 
nearly a whole quadrant while we were crossing the 
Plains, to blend with the Elk Mountain range as we 
ascended. The evening had been bracing, but not 
unpleasantly sharp, upon the Plains. Ascending from 
an elevation of eight thousand feet, however, a man 
is not compelled to go very far for cold weather. We 
had not climbed an hour among the gray, cerebral 
convolutions of this tract, before the cold became 
intense enough, not only for overcoats, but for all 
the blankets we could wrap in. I was quite be- 
numbed upon my favorite seat at the driver's side ; 
and he himself suffered severely under a heavy-caped 
coachman's coat of pilot-cloth, his fingers aching and 
stiffening around the lines inside Indian mittens of 
thick buckskin. Yet we could scarcely have chosen 
a more favorable season to cross the range, and this 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 225 

was one of the pleasantest nights in the entire year. 
I expressed to the driver my sincere desire that I 
might never be here during the least pleasant ones, 
and climbed around through the stage door into the 
interior. 

It was early daybreak when we stopped at the base 
of the great Elk Mountain. The air was perfectly 
clear, and so intensely cold that while our horses 
were changing, we collected the dead boughs of some 
stinted cedars, and made ourselves a jolly camp-fire, 
at which we simultaneously warmed our benumbed 
bodies, and extracted our breakfast coffee. 

Just at our left and southernmost hand rose the 
rugged wedge of the Elk Mountain, save in occa- 
sional reddish-gray patches of protruding granite, 
snow-clad from base to edge. It overtopped our own 
lofty level by full three thousand feet, "we ourselves 
being at between nine thousand and ten thousand 
feet of elevation. 

The two most massive mountains which I saw dur- 
ing my entire journey, were this Elk Mountain and 
the Old Cheyenne, guarding the south approach to 
Pike's Peak. There are higher peaks, but no nobler 
mountains than these broad masses of bald or snow- 
clad rock, with a general trapezoidal surface, broken 
into splendid variations of light and shade, and hav- 
ing an almost horizontal sky-line, when the sunlight 
strikes its crest of eternal ice, defined as sharply as a 
razor's edge. 

The base of the Elk Mountain is surrounded with 
forests, consisting of all the mountain species; and the 
water from its snow rivulets keeps the herbage fresh 
under the trees. As a result, game has always been 
very plenty here, the Elk Mountain hunting-grounds 

16 



226 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

being famous alike to the Indian and the white man, 
who, by struggles not a few, have tested their relative 
rights of entry upon the domain. The animals which 
gave the mountain its name were abundant at this 
season, and the Colorado deer and antelope no less 
so. We had frequent opportunities to try the meat 
of all these animals, and found elk-meat a translation 
of venison into the vulgar dialect, while antelope was 
venison's apotheosis. 

After leaving the Elk Mountain, we continued dur- 
ing the entire morning to traverse one of these desert 
plateaus, which are characteristic of the Rocky Moun- 
tain system, and to which I have already referred in 
the itinerary of the day before we reached Laramie 
Plains. It consisted of a series of terraces, casually 
mistakable for an effect of wind-blown sand, had not 
occasional ledges of trap shown that all belonged to 
one system of elevation, and that where the sand had 
heaped the rock out of sight, the dikes still kept their 
strike uniform. For ten miles the plateau was mainly 
covered with sand. Through this here and there pro- 
jected a columnar mass, or a curious series of trape- 
zoids, arranged stair-fashion ; but its general effect was 
that of a level ash-bed, in which throve the pale saf- 
fron blossoms of the palmate cacti, and the delicate 
pink cactus flower, like a baby's finger-tips seen in 
sunlight, which grows on a globular body like an aris- 
tocratic artichoke. Add to the inventory of vegetable 
life an occasional whorl of gramma-grass, a scattering 
of dwarfed wormwoods, a patch of grease-wood here 
and there, and a variety of those pale-leaved plants, 
covered with a soft sessile down, which, all over the 
barrenest tracts east of Salt Lake, cling to the ground 
so close that frequently they are not distinguished 
from it by the traveller. 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 227 

For the first time on our journey, I found, crawling 
among the cactuses and sand-heaps of this plateau, 
that singular little animal, known vulgarly as the 
Texan Toad, or Horned Frog, though in reality he 
does not belong to the family of the Ranidae at all, but 
is a nearer relation to the lizards and salamanders. 
The range of this animal is singularly eccentric. On 
the baked, droughty prairies of Texas, it is found un- 
der a semi-tropical sun ; travellers have met with it as 
high north as the Sweetwater, and indeed, for aught 
I know, it may exist on many of the sand-plains be- 
tween the South Pass and the DrJles of the Columbia ; 
and frequent specimens of it are met with on the way 
between Julesberg and Fort Laramie, along the North 
Platte trail. This plateau, however, was the only tract 
on which we found them during our present expedi- 
tion. At a height at least equal to that of Laramie 
Plains, surrounded visibly on almost all sides by snow- 
peaks, and itself snowed under for several months of 
the year, this waste still supports ah animal whose 
type resembles those of the torrid rather than the 
temperate zone. The only condition on which he 
seems inclined to stickle is aridity ; put him where 
there is apparently nothing for him to live on, and 
temperature is a secondarj^ matter. 

These " toads " have an earthy brown back, which 
is broader and flatter than that of the true garden 
reptile ; a white belly ; a small, twinkling black eye, 
not all ugly or malicious in its expression, and set 
in an almond-shaped slit, which in some of the older 
animals is inclosed by two dark lines of the same 
shape. This has an effect to enlarge the eye as if it 
had been penciled, and give it a soft look like that 
of a miniature sheep or antelope. The two retro- 



228 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

curved horns which arise out of the bony plate above 
the eyes, add still more to this odd resemblance. The 
skin of the back, and the long stiff tail, instead of 
being warty like the true toad's upper surface, are 
thickly set with thorny excrescences, sharp as those 
of a rose, and nearly as hard. That of the belly is not a 
soft mucous surface, like those of the frog and toad, 
but a dry, tough tissue, almost horny in its character, 
imbricated with exquisite delicacy in minute rectan- 
gular patterns, that give the little creature sufficient 
freedom of motion, and at the same time provide him 
with the most accurately linked and fitted of breast- 
plates. What all this panoply is for, I have never 
learned. The rattlesnake may be his enemy ; but, if 
so, toady leaves the offensive to him. The little ani- 
mal is so far from pugnacious, that he submits to be- 
ing taken into the hand ; in fact, if placed on it right 
after capture, will often stand there without an at- 
tempt to get away ; and it is the easiest possible thing 
to catch him in the first place, his gait, over the loose 
sand of his haunts, not exceeding in speed that of a 
common box-tortoise. This, by the way, is an animal 
which I only twice saw between the Missouri and Cal- 
ifornia : once on the road between Cottonwood (at 
the confluence of the North and South Platte) and 
Fremont's Spring in Nebraska ; again far up toward 
the snow-range, among the mines back of Denver. 
Neither of these differed remarkably from our com- 
monest Eastern variety. 

Just as I had about finished my naturalizing, hav- 
ing a handkerchief full of lizards, insects, and plants, 
and a pail brimming with horned toads, the area 
about us became suddenly still more sterile, and 
within a few hundred yards the sand plateau gave 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 229 

way to one of almost absolutely bare rock, terraced 
or escaladed in right lines, but with such a gradual 
descent to the westward that our road in most places 
went down the steps easily without detour, debris 
having filled in the sharpest angles. 

Nowhere do I recollect seeing a more colossal land- 
scape of desolation. Both my artist-friend and I rode 
through it for a long way silent, because we were 
overawed. 

It is difficult by an enumeration of details so to de- 
scribe this tract as to give any adequate notion of it 
to a reader who has never visited the scenery char- 
acteristic of rainless plateaus in a lofty mountain re- 
gion. 

Our road followed the lowest indentations of the 
rocky uplifts, being in many places a mere wheel- 
scratch on their surface; and thus we might fancy 
ourselves upon a street, along which these trap struc- 
tures had been erected. It was difficult not so to 
fancy when we noticed the remarkable symmetry 
with which the rocks were arranged. They mostly 
seemed of the same coarse trap variety as those of the 
Palisades, with an occasional streak of greenstone or 
of phonolite. They had come up through the most 
curious net-work of dikes, in which the strikes crossed 
each other nearly at right angles, producing a four- 
square arrangement of masses which reminded one 
forcibly of architecture and city blocks. But neither 
a city nor an architecture that was human. Many 
single blocks of trachyte, standing isolated to mark 
the corner of a square, were fifty feet cube, and as 
regular as if they had been chiseled. In other sit- 
uations I saw numerous series of tabular masses, 
arranged like a flight of stone steps each ten feet 



230 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

or more in height, and in all running to a height of 
at least a hundred feet. In still other places the 
uplifts have split perpendicularly, leaving fragments 
of a flat rectangular form, standing like the rugged 
tomb-stones of a giant's burial-ground, to the height 
of from twenty to a hundred feet. 

As we penetrated further into this tract, the archi- 
tectural appearances became so consistent, that one's 
fancy was compelled to construct a theory for itself, 
and did it very rationally to the effect that we were 
travelling through a deserted city of the conquered 
Titans. Those colossal square inclosures were the 
wine cellars and treasure-vaults of palaces thousands 
of feet high. In those acres of basement what vast 
wassail may have been held on the return of the mas- 
ters from hunting megatheria, fishing for icthyosauri, 
or playing quoits with cross-slices off a volcano ! 
That mighty cube of black fire-rock, which weighs a 
thousand tons, was but one of a single course of stones 
in the same rectangle, upon whose foundation the now 
down-tumbled house was built — high as the eaves of 
a tall city house itself, but only at the bottom of a 
structure whose roof menaced the gods. 

The ruined staircases to which I have referred, often 
stood alone in such relative position to the basement 
rectangles that it required no stretch of the imagina- 
tion to conceive of them as the former access to the 
grand front entrance of the house — an appearance 
with which their dimensions were equally consistent. 
In several instances I noticed that the interior of the 
rectangles was paved in square blocks, with a regular- 
ity, which would lead any one ignorant of the scientific 
means to suppose that the area had been flagged by 
human labor, and presented the appearance of some 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUKTAINS. 231 

fortress court-yard. Nothing could be at once more 
characteristically sepulchral and Titanic than the 
spaces occupied by the tablets. Some of these were 
erect as I have described, but many lay on corner 
blocks, like the horizontal grave-stones of old-fash- 
ioned country church-yards. Here, stretched many 
a rood under the torrid sand, with prickly cactuses 
springing out of their brains, and wormwood out of 
their hearts, may lie the great warriors who fell on 
this same blasted heath in battle with Olympus. But 
they are no more silent than are the old lords of the 
palace who fell under the powdered ruins, the base- 
ment stones of which alone remain for witness, be- 
ing lightened upon by Zeus Keraunios, and shot into 
the abyss, in the very ripeness of blasphemy, wassail, 
and defiance. 

However forced this fancy may appear to the cool 
reader, it irresistibly suggested itself on the spot. 
The shapes and sizes of all the rocks within view 
contributed such consistent aid to this idea, that I 
travelled with a sense of delightful awe, as if I were 
exploring the gigantic remains of some dead civiliza- 
tion, — a Layard of the Titans. It would hardly have 
surprised me to find a hierographical inscription cut 
upon some corner-stone in letters a cubit deep. 

About one p. m. we caught sight of a silvery streak 
in a valley about fifteen hundred feet below our pres- 
ent terrace. This we soon found to be the North 
Platte River, whose mature stream we had left at 
Latham, and whose upper waters we were now about 
to cross at no great distance from their source. By 
consulting a United States Survey map, it will be 
seen that this stream doubles on itself remarkably, 
rising just outside the southern wall of the mountain 



232 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

quadrilateral which incloses Laramie Plains, following 
the outer edge of the terraces which bound the level 
westerly, and reaching the Plains by an eastward re- 
turn w^iicli brings it within a comparatively short 
distance northerly from the cradle where it sprung. 

We now emerged from the gradually terraced dikes, 
and came to a place where the descent was so precip- 
itous, that sitting on a coach-box one might well feel 
anxious about tumbling forward on the horses. Our 
road ran on bare cracked boulders of trap and altered 
sandstone ; threaded black fissures ; and slid, with the 
brake hard on, down slippery stone inclines, just over 
the edge of whose narrow shelf was a sheer precipice 
or overhanging wall of trachyte, two or three hun- 
dred feet high. 

We marked the first appearance of the Platte, far 
to the south, in the fold of a system of round gray 
hills, which, as nearly as could be judged from their 
contour, belonged to that incoherent granite forma- 
tion weathered into spherical forms, which I men- 
tioned at Virginia Dale. The stream passed out of 
view to the northeastward, through a precipitous 
carton of red sandstone, having frequent shelves and 
hutments which projected several feet from the main 
wall, and averaging perhaps forty or fifty feet in 
height from the water-line. Its course traversed 
nearly the whole of our western horizon, being much 
of the way distinguishable from our elevation, by 
glimpses of silvery water or fringes of the always 
indicative cotton-wood. The round hills which close 
by at Virginia Dale had seemed, both in form and 
color, the convolutions of some petrified brain, now 
softened by distance, and having their gramma and 
sage-brush lighted by the intensest sun, looked like a 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 233 

flock of Cyclop sheep, whose woolly backs were 
rounded for slumber as they lay down beside the 
still waters of the Platte. Each glimpse of those 
waters the sun was now turning into a pool of silver 
fire. 

Just as we rounded a steep jutting bastion of trap, 
which threw us a little further towards the outer 
precipice, I turned away from the beautiful valley 
view to look upward at those grim crags and ter- 
races, by whose staircase we were descending to the 
Platte. I had looked just in time, for my point of 
view was exactly right for the recognition of one of 
the greatest mimetic wonders I ever saw, even in this 
most Titanic and Demoniacal country. 

The terrace of the Giants' Graveyard, now left be- 
hind about five hundred feet above us, was perceived 
to have an extension far to the southward and west- 
ward of the point where we came down from it, until, 
a mile in front of our present niche, it projected a 
bold promontory into the valley, beyond the face of 
the entire remaining precipice, and at least a hundred 
feet higher. The lower and much the larger part of 
this promontory was perpendicular, or overhanging; 
but the upper end of it, for three hundred feet, was 
weathered into a colossal sculpture, a head and bust 
of such striking sharpness and vigor, that it seemed 
almost as impossible that no human artist had had a 
hand in the work as it was inconceivable how he 
could have accomplished it. 

Behind this promontory, up to the occiput of the 
sculptured head, ran the wall of a principal trap 
dike ; and further behind, overtopping the wall in a 
series of ascending towers and bastions, rose a vast 
pile of the same tremendous cubes, which constituted 



234 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the foundations of the ruined palaces. It was an 
easy thing to imagine loopholes in that climbing city 
of strongholds ; to see a spectral flag wave from the 
highest rampart ; to wonder at the structure's grand, 
simple lines, as if we were criticising some splendid 
piece of military architecture ; to delight in its idea 
as if Nature shared your humanity. 

Braced against the westward wall of this Titanic 
fortress, and looking across the drowsy flock of hills 
shepherded by the silver crook of the Platte, — due 
west across the green oasis which, on the river mar- 
gin, hundreds of feet below, awaited us with trees, 
grass, springs, and dinner, — solemn, stern, and satur- 
nine, looked forth the face of John Calvin. 

If a sculptor had undertaken to copy in stone the 
best known likenesses of this noted theologian, the 
result could not have been a more striking portrait. 
Any person familiar with the picture, would most 
instantly have seen it in this head and bust. Even 
to the traditional Genevese cap, this was the theolo- 
gian's second self If Presbyterians ever adopt the 
usage of a Mecca, this is the site for that Mecca. 
Here sits the Prophet, bearing witness forever ; and 
his darkened, painful face shows that the Natural 
Depravity whereof he testified in Geneva, has not 
gone out of fashion since he left that pulpit. Look- 
ing westward, round the globe, he sees plenty to de- 
range his moral liver ; and because those rocky lips 
have no voice to utter warning, he sends it across 
the valley in a form of stone. From the point where 
I stood, I could see hardly a place on head, cap, or 
face, which could have been bettered, as likeness, 
by a more elaborate bringing out of details. The 
simulation was perfect, and for nearly half a mile 



INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 235 

continued so, with varying expressions of wrath or 
sternness, from every point of view. 

Finally emerging from the terrace region, we came 
out upon the green and shady Platte bottom, which 
we had seen just below us for the last hour, and 
stopped at the ferry-station for our dinner. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 

We crossed the North Platte by an ingenious con- 
trivance which I here saw for the first time, though 
I cannot but think that some time or other it must 
have been employed upon many of our narrow East- 
ern streams, at places too deep and rapid for fording. 
This is a ferry-boat whose motive power was the cur- 
rent it had to cross. I venture to believe many of 
my readers as ignorant as I found myself, and en- 
deavor to give some idea of this ingenious contriv- 
ance. 

A stout post, square-hewn from an entire trunk, 
about eighteen inches in diameter, is driven firmly 
into each of the opposite bluffs, and between the two, 
tautened by a windlass, extends a heavy hempen ca- 
ble, roven through a pair of lignum-vitae double- 
blocks, of sufficient breadth of eye and depth of 
groove to run without friction and quite independ- 
ent of each other, from post to post. The lowest sag 
of the cable, just over midstream, brings it within 
eight or ten feet of the water-level. So much for the 
locomotive apparatus. 

The ferry-boat is a rough, strongly built scow, with 
standing room for a four-in-hand team and as many 
passengers as choose to wedge themselves in between 
horses and piles of baggage, — a craft apparently of 
ten or twelve tons burden. At each of its square ends 



THE APPEOACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 237 

an iron ring-bolt is securely screwed into the keelson, 
and to each ring a double pulley-block is attached by 
a hook. Through each of these blocks a stout line 
runs to the lower wheel of the corresponding block 
on the cable which spans the stream, reeves through 
it, and, returning inboard, passes around the second 
pulley of the block hooked to the ring-bolt to the 
hand of the ferryman, or a convenient cleat, where 
he fastens it with a half-hitch. By substituting the 
cable for a boom, a sloop's main-sheet may be made to 
give a correct idea of this apparatus and its modus 
operandi. When the two sheets are of equal length, 
the current strikes the side of the scow at right an- 
gles and it remains stationary. To set it in motion, 
it is only necessary to close-haul the sheet at that end 
of the scow which is intended for the bow pro tem- 
pore, and slacken the one at the other end. The cur- 
rent now performs the function discharged by a wind 
a-beam in the case of sailing vessels, and takes the 
ferry-boat across very cleverly. 

The ferryman was a fine-looking solitary, who spent 
months at a time camped out under the cotton-woods 
of the margin without seeing a face except that of the 
emigrant or the traveller, yet lived in great comfort 
and contentedness in what might be called the most 
oui^of-the-way spot on the Northern Continent. His 
calling was certainly of the most valuable character 
to his fellow-men, and equally so to himself; amount- 
ing to a monopoly of the entire transit business on 
the most important trail between the Missouri and 
California. He could not fail to make a fine income, 
charging, I beheve, two dollars a team for all ordinary 
ferriage, and having a private arrangement with Mr. 
Holladay. 



238 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

I left this place with much regret, having a strong 
desire to explore the mountains south of us, from 
which the river issued, and between which for many 
miles, in the exquisitely clear atmosphere, we could 
catch glimpses of it in its silvery and sinuous course. 
Indeed, a month's stay there would not have been 
thrown away, either for purposes of art or science ; 
the trap dikes, heretofore mentioned, being of the 
most interesting character, and the fauna and flora 
of the region tempting one by their marked indi- 
viduality. I am not aware of a more favorable 
place for a depot camp of Rocky Mountain explorers 
than this ferriage. Among the attractions from which 
I broke in continuing my journey, were the " horned 
toads " of the rocky plateau, and a species of " fish 
with legs " which had been seen in the small streams 
emptying into the Platte not far from here. I suf- 
fered the frequent fate of specimen gatherers in the 
Rocky Mountains, and lost every horne^toad I had 
collected. The scientific student, after a few weeks' 
experience in a country where transportation is so 
difficult, learns to expect that much of his material 
will get destroyed or left behind, even where he has 
taken the most particular pains to collect and preserve 
it, and meets his disappointments with cool philoso- 
phy ; but this particular case of my own was greatly 
aggravated by being not the result of chance but of a 
stupid retaliation on the part of a fellow-passenger, 
who secreted the box in which I had placed my speci- 
mens while we were ferrying across our luggage, and 
opened it on the west bank of the Platte, letting all 
my morning's collection escape. When it became too 
late to make the loss good, the stage having started, 
I was informed of the proceeding as a capital joke. 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 239 

If my toads shall establish a colony on the west bank, 
for the convenience of future collectors, I shall not 
so much regret my own disappointment. I regretted 
it at the time all the more, because one or two of the 
animals appeared to me a different species from any 
of the Phrynosomata I have ever seen described ; in 
their general figure resembling P. Doiiglassii, and 
their heads being decidedly like that of P. Cornu- 
tum. At several places in the mountains I sought for 
the " fish with legs," which almost every old moun- 
taineer has seen, but for none of which, as a matter 
of course, can anything be obtained like a scientific 
description. Whenever we stopped near a small 
stream to water or change horses, I spent all the 
available time in looking for him, but regret to say 
that fortune never favored me. I suppose the animal 
to be a species of Siredon. I need not explain to the 
student of natural history my anxiety to obtain a 
fresh specimen, — perhaps even a new species, of a 
genus thus far represented in cabinets by but two 
or three species and very few individuals, even these 
inadequate relics being imperfectly preserved. 

The animal to which Baird has given the specific 
name of Lichenoides is one of the most beautiful and 
interesting of reptiles ; having the head without the 
horns of the cat-fish, and a respiratory apparatus 
consisting of three branchial flaps on each side of the 
neck, fringed more delicately than the gills of any 
fish ; and owing its special designation to the yellow 
spots distributed over the black or brown ground of 
its skin, like the variegations caused by lichens on the 
surface of a stone. 

At Sage Creek, an inconsiderable but unfailing riv- 
ulet, fed from the snow-peaks, and about fourteen 



240 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

miles from the North Platte crossing, we met for the 
first time the bird most characteristic of the intra- 
montane levels and western slope of the Rocky Range 
— the Sage-cock. 

This bird may well be called the king of the grouse 
tribe. His own average length is about thirty-two 
inches, and his hen's two feet ; but I have seen speci- 
mens which exceed these measurements by several 
inches. When stalking erect through the sage, they 
seem as large as a good sized wild turkey. Their color 
and markings differ to some extent with age, sex, the 
season of the year, and the different individuals ; but 
the prevailing appearance is that of a yellowish brown, 
or a warm gray mottled with darker brown, shading 
from cinnamon to jet black, the dark spots laid on 
in longitudinal series of crescents. Their under parts 
are of a light gray, — sometimes of almost a pure 
white tint, — barred by slender longitudinal, streaks 
of brown, — the middle of the belly being pied with 
black patches. Their plumage is exquisitely smooth ; 
the feathers of a handsome cock lying so close and 
kept in such perfect order, that under a bright sun he 
looks more like a bird encased in some beautifully 
grained and polished veneering than one in the usual 
cloak of feathers. The elegance of his figure ex- 
ceeds that of any grouse on the Continent. He is 
slenderer and finer in his outlines than any allied 
bird, except the Chinese or golden pheasant. In rec- 
ognition of his resemblance to these birds he gets 
one of his numerous aliases, — Tetrao (Bonaparte), or 
Centrocerciis (Swainson) Urophasianus. This last and 
specific title etymologists will recognize as Greek for 
" pheasant- tailed." This tail of his seems to have puzr 
zled ornithologists somewhat as to the place where he 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 241 

belongs. It differs from that of the grouse family in 
general, by coming to a point instead of flaring in a 
fan ; and some of his sponsors have made a new species 
for him, taking him out of the Tetraonidse and calling 
him Centrocercus, which, in connection with his specific 
title, certainly amounts to a pleonasm, the word be- 
ing derived from the Greek xevtpov (a point) and xsp- 
xog (a tail), so that the translation of Swainson's no- 
menclature would be " The Pheasant-tailed Pointrtail." 
The better view still keeps the bird a Tetrao. On 
each side of his neck he has a bare orange-colored 
spot, and near it a downy epaulet, which allies him 
as nearly to the ruffed grouse as his tail to the pheas- 
ant. His call is a rapid " cut-cut-cut," followed by a 
hollow blowmg sound ; he has the partridge's habit 
of drumming with his wings ; his female knows the 
trick of misleading the enemy from her young brood ; 
and although his curves are much longer and his fig- 
ure less siock?/ than that of the grouse tribe in gen- 
eral, his affiliations on the whole seem stronger in 
that direction than in any other. He seldom rises 
from the ground, and his occasional flights are low, 
short, and labored ; but he runs with rapidity, and in 
his favorite habitat, the sage brush, dodges and skulks 
with great dexterity, favored by the resemblance be- 
tween his own and the bushes' neutral tints. His 
common title of sage-cock is derived from his favorite 
haunt. Another of his aliases is " Cock of the Plains," 
but I never knew him so called out of books, for the 
title is not descriptive. He is never seen on the 
Plains proper — the high mountain region, whether 
level or sloping, swarming with his family wherever 
sage is plenty, from the vicinity of the Rocky Moun- 
tain water-shed westerly to the Desert, and several 

16 



242 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

hundred miles further west in the latitude of the 
South Pass, where he extends as far as the cataracts 
of the Columbia. In that region the sage brush has 
a much further westerly extension than further south, 
— and the bird peculiarly belongs to this growth of 
vegetation. Thus far, to my knowledge, he has never 
been found west of the Cascade Range or the Sierra 
Nevada. In the spring, or about the time of snow 
melting, which of course varies at different heights 
and in different latitudes, the sage-hen builds in the 
bush her nest of sticks and reeds, quite artistically 
matted together, and lays from a dozen to twenty eggs, 
a trifle larger than the average of the domestic fowl, 
of a tawny color, irregularly marked with chocolate 
blotches on the larger end. Her period of incubation 
does not, I believe, differ much from that of the do- 
mestic hen. When the brood is large enough to 
travel, its parents lead it into general society. In 
July and August the flocks begin assembling, and by 
fall it is not unusual to meet bands of two or three 
hundred. I reached and crossed their habitat during 
the last week in June, and between Sage Creek and 
Salt Lake daily encountered flocks of a score or over. 
I know scarcely any animal whose range is more 
sharply defined. It is a rare thing to meet with them 
on the eastern flanks of the ridges belonging to the 
Rocky Mountain system ; though while I was in 
Denver, my friend, the indefatigable naturalist Dr. 
Wernigk, . brought back from an expedition into 
the South Park very fine specimens of both cock 
and hen. This fact, however, hardly constitutes an 
exception to the general rule, since South Park 
is but little over a degree further east than Sage 
Creek, and sheds a portion of its water to the west 



/ 

THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 243 

by small affluents of the Grand Fork of Colorado, 
though most of its drainage is by the South Platte. 

I never saw tamer wild fowl than the little troop of 
sage-chickens which we encountered on striking Sage 
Creek. I could hardly realize they were what they 
were, though I had a vividly correct image of them 
in my mind from the stuffed specimens of Dr. Wer- 
nigk, and the admirable drawings of Baird's collec- 
tion. As we wound along the brook margin, they 
strutted complacently between the gnarled trunks 
and ashen masses of foliage peculiar to the sage, pay- 
ing scarcely more attention to us than a barn-yard 
drove of turkeys (whose motion theirs much resem- 
bles), the cocks now and then stopping to play the 
dandy before their more Quakerish little hens, in- 
flating the yellow patches of skin on each side of 
their necks, by a peculiar air-syphon apparatus, until 
they globed out like the pouches of a pouter pigeon. 
As this was the first time I had seen them in their 
native haunts, and because their confidence quite 
disarmed me, I had no thought of shooting them, 
and had the driver slow his team to give our party 
a better opportunity of studying them. They con- 
tinued dodging about the bushes not more than forty 
feet from us, until we thoroughly familiarized our- 
selves with their manners ; and acknowledged that 
although some others of the grouse tribe rejoiced in 
richer colors than they, they certainly bore away the 
palm in the exquisite symmetry of their markings, 
and the grace of their figures as well as their move- 
ments. Wishing to get nearer them for the purpose 
of seeing if any young ones were concealed in the 
brush (whose trunks, consisting each of a number of 
smaller stems united in a spiral twisted as tight as 



244 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

any hawser, here measured everywhere the thickness 
of a man's thigh), I dismounted and quietly crept 
toward them. They did not take the alarm until I 
had got within twenty feet of them, and then went 
under cover with an air of dignified leisure. I sup- 
pose they knew by instinct that they had Httle to 
fear. Science and wantonness were their only ene- 
mies. I had their whole country before me, and 
would not burden myself with specimens prema- 
turely ; I was not fond of destroying life merely for 
murder's sake, and none of our party were starving. 
To kill a sage-hen for supper demands either this last 
condition, or the stomach of an Indian ; for, with this 
handsome grouse, beauty is preeminently but skin 
deep, — the flesh of the bird, save in the youngest 
chickens, being a mess rather for the apothecary's 
shop than the kitchen. The sage -fowl not only live 
in the brush from which they get their name, but feed 
on it, as well as on the insects and smaller reptiles 
about its roots, thus acquiring a rank sage flavor 
which repeated parboilings followed by roasting can- 
not entirely eradicate. The wild sage has no connec- 
tion with our garden variety, except through its 
popular name and very unpopular taste, being, in 
fact, a wormwood [Artemisia tridentata), while our fa- 
miliar pot-herb is the Salvia officinalis. 

Sage Creek runs nearly due north and empties into 
a small nameless stream, which is the most westerly 
affluent of the North Platte, and which rises from the 
very summit of the water-shed penetrated by Bridg- 
er's Pass. After leaving Sage Creek we crossed two 
more anonjnnous rivulets which go to swell this afflu- 
ent, on the way stopping at Pine Grove Station, 
twenty-four miles from the North Platte Crossing, to 
change horses. 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 245 

Here we found, in the person of the station-keeper, 
one of the finest specimens of the American hunter 
and fearless pioneer encountered in our whole jour- 
ney. He was a splendidly built fellow, not more than 
twenty-two or three years old, six feet high, with an 
arm like a grizzly's paw, a fine, frank, fearless face, full 
of ruddy health and quenchless cheerfulness. There 
was a look of capability and resource about him which 
made it easy to understand how the wilds of our coun- 
try are settled, its rocky fastnesses made to roar with 
the blast of the forge, and echo to the sound of 
axe and hammer. Set him beside one <of our pale, 
puny Metropolitan counter-jumpers, and ask the in- 
habitant of another planet to label the two for the 
shelves of some anthropological cabinet : ten to one 
they would not be included in the same species, per- 
haps not in the same genus of animal life. The 
young station-keeper told us that he had a partner, 
but it was very rare for both of them to be at home 
together. He had now been alone for several days, 
taking care of the stock, while the other man was 
trapping and shooting equally alone in the moun- 
tains. When we asked him what game he hunted, he 
invited us into his cabin and pointed us to the walls 
for the shortest answer. The skins hung so thick 
that we could not see the logs. Among them were 
a number of full-sized grizzly robes, and a few pretty 
little cub-skins, very soft and silky, belonging to the 
same species ; a cinnamon bear-skin, besides gray and 
white wolf-skins, *fox-skins, deer-hides, and smaller 
peltry without stint, including the wolverine, an ex- 
quisitely marked tiger-cat, and the robe of a moun- 
tain lion. His cabinet of deer and elk horns would 
have brought hundreds of dollars, if offered to an 



246 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Eastern sportsman decorating his library. His taste 
in adornment was excellent ; the lady-love of a prince 
might have envied him his boudoir. All his skins 
were in excellent preservation. The only one that 
he had never been able to preserve was that of the 
antelope ; and that animal must forever baffle the 
cabinet collector, for his hair differs from that of every 
quadruped but the porcupine. It is stiff and spongy; 
the gentlest pull brings out a bunch of it in one's 
fingers, and this bunch looks and feels like a bundle 
of short threads of spun glass. Where it is thickest, 
on the breast and about the haunches, it stands out 
lUie bristles radiating from a centre in the brush 
form, with concentric rings of coarse, brittle fibre 
arranged round it. I have never seen anything ex- 
actly like it in any other animal, and never in the 
antelope anything like the other ruminants' wool or 
hair. The fibres of the antelope pelt are sometimes 
so brittle that they break across as easily as the spun 
glass which they resemble. The skin is thus value- 
less for the fur trade or the cabinet, a fact which I 
have often regretted ; for its appearance upon the 
animal, with the sunlight striking its tawny ground 
and snow-white patches, as it goes glancing down a 
bluff in the arrow-flight of a stampede, is very beau- 
tiful. 

Among other trophies which interested me greatly, 
were the horns and skin of a " Bighorn," or Rocky 
Mountain sheep ( Ovis Montana), an animal which even 
in the heart of this savage region is practically rare, 
since, like the chamois, it frequents the most inac- 
cessible fastnesses, and is never seen save by the 
hunter who devotes himself entirely to its pursuit. 
The wariest Indian often lies in wait for it for days 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 247 

without seeing it, and when finally he does catch a 
glimpse of it, it only reveals itself on the brink of 
some snow-covered crag hundreds of feet above him, 
where neither ball nor arrow could strike, and no 
living being but its own kind could reach it without 
wings. Its color is a grayish brown, like that of a 
ram in a dusty, droughty summer just before " sheep- 
washing " time, with a darker line down the spine, 
after the ass's fashion. Its horns (as one of the pop- 
ular names indicates) are immense. Some of the old 
hunters told me that a pair, with the clean skull, 
sometimes weighed sixty pounds, but I have never 
found any actual authentic weight exceeding half 
that. The horns, like those of the antelope, are 
rooted so immediately above the orbital process that 
they seem to rise directly out of the eyes. They are 
almost close together at the base, where it is not 
unusual to find them measuring twenty inches in 
circumference. They curve gradually and evenly 
backward in an arc of about two hundred degrees, 
and to a length of thirty to forty inches, their tips 
being about half their length apart from each other. 
Their hoofs are generally black, and unlike the ante- 
lopes' are provided with the deiv-claw, or upper and 
posterior rudimentary hoof common to the allied gen- 
era. Their hair is less brittle than the antelopes', 
and in winter is interspersed with a short, fine fleece, 
apparent on parting the straight fibres; but they 
have nothing that in the least approaches the wool 
of our domestic sheep. The animal is of immense 
size, the adults weighing between three and four 
hundred pounds. I have heard from old hunters and 
Indians, that when surjDrised upon a precipice where 
there is no room to turn, the bighorn wiU plunge 



248 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

headlong a distance of a hundred feet, and strike on 
his horns without breaking them or bruising him- 
self, then bound to his feet by aid of their elastic 
spring, and run away as if nothing had happened. I 
cannot vouch for this story, since our party had no 
time to make a protracted halt at the great altitude 
which is the favorite and almost only habitat of the 
bighorn. Indeed, I must confess to never having 
seen him alive ; but I have found the hunters of this 
country more strictly and conscientiously accurate in 
regard to facts, than any class of men from whom I 
have ever sought information. The theories by 
which they explain their facts have no more value 
than attaches to those of uneducated men anywhere, 
being, of course, frequently in diametrical opposition 
to established principles of science, and arising from 
a confusion of concomitant circumstances with the 
idea of cause and effect. But their report of matters 
lying wholly within experience is more trustworthy 
than that of the best educated savant, their eyes, 
ears, and all their senses being trained to a vigilant 
keenness which nothing escapes, and their freedom 
from superstition (a constant element of error in in- 
formation given by the wildwoodsmen of other na- 
tions) securing them from the danger of mystical 
exaggeration. I believe I have before referred to an 
instance of this in the notion of prairie-dogs, owls, and 
snakes all inhabiting the same burrow. I was per- 
petually assured by plain, practical frontiersmen that 
the notion was a correct one, and after putting the 
question to repeated careful tests, discovered that 
they were right and the savant was wrong. So I can 
conceive it possible that the Rocky Mountain sheep 
does dive headlong from precipices and break his fall 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 249 

by a pair of horns for whose magnificent spiral curves 
and immense size there can scarcely be imagined any 
other, and certainly no better use. But it needs an 
enthusiast indeed to study an animal who keeps his 
admirers a week at the perpetual snow-line before 
vouchsafing them so much as a glimpse of him. 

The young station-keeper's cabin was not far from 
that altitude. It was situated on a narrow shelf of 
one of the highest ranges, in a dense grove of firs and 
pines, and built of nicely hewn logs, cut close at hand. 
When we consider that, with the exception of this 
timber which made his dwelling, and the water which 
trickled from the adjacent snow-peaks for his drink, 
every necessary of life both for his horses, his partner, 
and himself, had to be brought to this solitary crest 
of the Continent all the way from the Missouri River 
(nine hundred and thirteen miles) by wagon, we may 
form some proximate idea of the indomitable energy 
required of the man, who, like Ben HoUaday, could 
keep in steady running order a daily freight and pas- 
senger line across the entire Continent. A hitch in 
the machinery of this vast system, occurring in the 
stables or granaries of this station, packed away as it 
is in the loneliest recesses of the world's topmost 
ridge, — the furthest-qf t^I^^qq, so to speak, that mortal 
can imagine, — anything awry here may throw out 
of gear important interests and arrangements in St. 
Louis or San Francisco. But things did not go awry ; 
for one single tireless man, with the finest talent for 
business combinations that exists in America, was for- 
ever dropping into cabins under the snow-peaks and 
adobes sweltering on the sand of the desert ; making 
the master's eye felt by the very horses ; creating a 
belief in his omnipresence, and a sense that it was 



I 
250 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

worth while to be worthy of his confidence ; he was 
found in every part of the vast machinery whose steam 
lay in his audacious force of character, and whose gov- 
ernor consisted of his unrivaled business tact. Just 
before I left New York I saw him at an artists' re- 
ception at Dodworth's. I ask the Pine Grove hermit 
if he ever saw Mr. Holladay. " You bet ! " replies 
my hermit ; " he was here day before yesterday." 

With the exception of the abrupt descent made by 
us from the plateau of the remarkable trap dikes, 
down the terraces where John Calvin frowns in eter- 
nal petrifaction to the last crossing of the Platte, we 
had been climbing steadily to this cabin, from the 
simset which saw us over the lesser fork of Laramie 
and the moonlight which made silver filagree of the 
splash from our horses' hoofs as we forded Cooper's 
Creek. We were now, by the most reasonable esti- 
mate, at an altitude of more than ten thousand feet. 
Our calculations were corroborated by the character 
of the surrounding vegetation. We had parted from 
cotton-woods on the western verge of Laramie Plains. 
Then the osiers left us, and the dry Artemisia fringed 
the snow-cold rivulets that traversed our trail — com- 
ing, with the grease wood, clear down to the margin 
where at less elevations we might have looked for a 
swaying willowy fringe. Now, at Pine Grove, decidu- 
ous vegetation failed almost entirely. The hardiest 
of the succulent-leaved trees gave way to that sturdy 
growth which is separated only by the moss and the 
lichen from absolute barrenness. We saw no longer 
the " quaking-asp " (Populus tremuloides) nor the canon 
maple (Acer macrophyllum, var. TJtahense ?\ Here was 
the kingdom of the Coniferae, and even these ^ were 
stinted. Around the young hunter's and station- 



THE APPKOACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 251 

keeper's cabin, the funereal foliage of spruce, and fir, 
and pine, attained a growth of but forty or fifty feet, 
though dense enough to add a strange solemnity to 
the obscure loneliness of this lofty mountain crest. 

Emerging from the black shadows of the pines, we 
came into a tract whose colossal wildness of scenery 
stands apart in my recollection, by virtue of the same 
class of traits which isolate certain lonely and severe 
human characters. 

In no one particular was it measured on so vast a 
scale as certain other savage landscapes I have vis- 
ited. But its toute ensemble was that of utter, unbroken 
solitude. We hardly needed the information vouch- 
safed us by the driver, that we were now crossing the 
dividino; ridore between the Atlantic and Pacific — 
the great water-shed of the Rocky Mountains. 

Even after my long experience of the breadth of the 
range, I was not fully prepared to find this ridge so 
unostentatious of its true character. True, I had not 
expected when I reached it to see, as from the sum- 
mit range of our narrow AUeghanies, the bird's-eye 
view of either slope and the plains below mottled with 
cloud and sunshine, and arabesqued in every direction 
by the silver threads of rivers belonging to the two 
systems of drainage ; but neither, on the other hand, 
had I looked for such a complete absence of all the 
distinctive traits proper to that idea of a moun- 
tain chain and water-shed which we get from maps 
and charts of physical geography. 

We were completely shut in by a chaos of moun- 
tains. Our track kept the summit of a sinuous di- 
vide, for the most part narrow as a railway embank- 
ment, save where it inosculated with other like ridges, 
coming, seemingly without system of distribution, 



252 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

from every direction, and separated by deep gullies, 
pits, and trenches, bare of all vegetation, save here 
and there a scanty tuft of bunch grass, which seemed 
rather to have been calked into the dry seams of the 
soilless granite than to grow out of them. Our divide 
possibly varied from a few hundred to a thousand 
feet in height above the holes and chasms ; while on 
either hand, looking in that crystal atmosphere of 
the upper world but a stone's cast off, and in reality 
at a distance to be measured by miles, the transverse 
convolutions of the range (those in fact which give 
propriety to its name of a "chain ") rose two or three 
thousand feet higher still. These cross ranges were 
very precipitous, ascending, without regard to the ir- 
regular glacis of detritus at their base, at an angle of 
60° to 70°, seamed with mighty scars where the frost 
had toppled over and slid off acre-large fragments of 
their battlements, furrowing their naked flanks all the 
way down — bare of all vegetation even in these 
channels — bare even of soil, until the eye paused just 
below their perpetual snow-line on a slender rim, 
green as emerald, fed by the meltings from above. It 
was almost midsummer, — a week after the solstice, — 
yet in many scars the snow lay uninterrupted from 
crest to base ; and along the whole irregular line of 
the ridges it was the packed accumulation of num- 
berless years, solidified to the consistency of a glacier, 
and wearing that peculiar pearl-blue or opalescent 
tint belonging to that formation. On the average 
the snow-line of these transverse ridges was drawn 
about a fifth of the distance downward from their 
crest, and the emerald band which ran almost exactly 
parallel, ranged half that distance further down the 
declivity. Below that, and in all directions around us, 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 253 

the congeries of mountains and lesser divides were 
bare as the pavement of a city, a quarry, or the driest 
thing known either to nature or to art. The prevail- 
ing color on the heights was a dull reddish brown; 
in the pits and chasms, a leaden gray. Up in the em- 
erald band was ice-cold water and succulent pastur- 
age for the bighorn ; thither must his hunter climb ; 
there, freezing through long nights when the mer- 
cury fell to zero, must he wait patiently ; there must 
he watch for days, with no food but a strip of jerked 
buffalo; thence might he never return at all, his 
hunter, the grizzly or the cougar, having " gobbled " 
him unaware ; or returning, have nought to bring 
down with him but a set of frozen toes and the hu- 
miliating experience of a long-range shot at some 
Ulysses among rams, who had jumped a chasm with 
an ounce ball in his shoulder, and gained his inacces- 
sible fastness in a peak a thousand feet higher yet. 

Just beyond the water-shed this basin of moun- 
tains contracts into a narrow gallery, walled by noble 
precipices of red granite and metamorphic sandstone, 
rising directly from the traveller's side to the almost 
perpendicular height of from a thousand to twenty- 
five hundred feet. In some places • this gallery ap- 
pears scarcely more than a crevice of dislocation, a 
mere crack between stupendous naked rocks which 
would match joints exactly if slid back to their old 
position. In no part of it does the resemblance to a 
work of engineering art cease to strike one. Though 
the passage is in reality abundantly ample for an 
army, the vast height of its lateral walls makes it 
seem proportionally so narrow that it might be the 
rock-cut of some bygone race of road-builders. This 
American Simplon is Bridger's Pass. It is several miles 



254 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

in length, and has a main westerly direction with a 
slope toward the same point of compass. It is quite 
sinuous, but nowhere turns so abruptly that its pas- 
sage is difficult to a four-horse team, nor is its descent 
anywhere so sudden as to be liable to a like objec- 
tion. I was astonished at finding the art of the en- 
gineer so far anticipated for the purpose of a con- 
venient transit route between the two coasts of our 
country, as everywhere appears in Bridger's Pass. It 
is named after the celebrated explorer and trader, 
Major James Bridger, who was either its first white 
discoverer, or the first to make it widely known as a 
convenient means of access to the vast interior basin 
of the Continent. He came to this region nearly 
forty-five years ago, and during much of the period 
since then, remained in constant relation with the In- 
dian tribes ranging between New Mexico and the 
Great South Pass — including those of the Upper 
Missouri, Green, and Columbia Rivers. He had estab- 
lished a trading post and an important depot and 
resting place for emigrants to California, at the fort 
which bears his name, long before it became a mih- 
tary station of the United States government. 

Just at the western portal of this magnificent gal- 
lery, and at a depression of perhaps fifteen hundred 
feet below its eastern entrance, we emerged into an- 
other basin-shaped valley, walled by snow-crested 
ridges like those surrounding the water-shed, but hav- 
ing a luxuriant green bottom, irrigated by rivulets 
from the meltings above. A large emigrant train had 
just made its halt there for the night. We felt an 
almost bovine sympathy for the cattle, who were 
eagerly browsing up to their bellies in the rank herb- 
age of the stream-margins. It was half an hour after 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 255 

sunset, and the horizon towards which we were trav- 
elling was flushed with a clear salmon hue, which 
contrasted finely with the dark green of the valley- 
bottom, the lighter emerald of the band beneath the 
snows of the encircling precipice, and the third, al- 
most black shade of the same color, manifested by 
the occasional groups of stinted evergreens, which 
marked the base of the slopes ; while a still livelier 
tone was infused into the middle ground by the leap- 
ing jets of yellow flame which rose from the crackling 
sage and grease wood of the camp-fires where supper 
was cooking for three hundred men, women, and chil- 
dren, and, as it flickered, made the snow-white tilts of 
the great ox-wagons seem to dance and waver, go and 
come, like cheerful ghosts. The camp was full of /? j 
farm-yard noises. Cows were lowing to be miked, J^J 
and suckling calves were bleating to their mothers ; ^ 
a wandering, snifling pack of curs were yelping at 
the welcome smell of supper and the thought of 
bones in reversion ; and, from their coops slung to 
the backs of the wagons, side by side with that cook- 
ing stove and hickory-bottomed chair which are the 
emigrant's inevitable Lares, bewildered hens were 
clucking, and anachronistic cocks uttering a real 
break-o'-day crow, — their ideas utterly turned topsy- 
turvey by the inability to mark time with the proper 
roosting pole, and the mimicry of sunrise by the flash 
of camp-fires. We got cheerful nods and friendly 
greetings as we trundled through the camp, and came 
a few miles further on to our own supper at the 
Overland station of Sulphur Springs. This was the 
most elaborate meal we had enjoyed for some time. 
Sitting on the box with the driver, I had so fascinated 
that high authority's imagination by a description of 



256 THE HEAKT OF THE CONTINENT. 

the canned provisions in our " outfit/* that he 
warmed to the proposition of stopping at Sulphur 
until I could prepare " a good square meal." The 
station-keeper at Sulphur had a wife and a baby. We 
expressed much delight at this joyful sight, — by no 
means a common one in the mountains or on the 
Desert, unless on an emigrant wagon in transitu, — and 
so won the family heart that we were admitted to all 
the rights and privileges of the cooking-stove. Get- 
ting out our provision box from under our feet in the 
wagon, we soon had employment provided for every 
utensil known to the Sulphur Springs cuisine. The 
sight of men cooking is no such portent in the Rocky 
Mountains as (unfortunately for health and good 
taste) it is in the rural districts of the East ; and the 
mother beamed on us kindly as she tended the baby 
with one arm and handed us condiments with the 
other, all with such dispatch that we had to warn her 
against mistaking hands in her excitement, and 
throwing the baby into the stewed tomatoes while 
she dandled the pepper. It would do the hearts of 
our Eastern acquaintance good to see the skilled fin- 
gers which had composed a glacier and innumerable 
mountain tops equally glib in hotter preparations, 
where the spoon was substituted for the paint brush; 
laying in a background of prepared coffee, and grad- 
ually bringing up the high-lights with an inspired 
touch of condensed cream ; while literary fingers, 
gambolling in long vacation from the pen, were pre- 
paring an article on the theme of Shaker sweet corn, 
another upon canned beef, and still another upon 
tomatoes, the whole edition of the work containing 
these to be absorbed eagerly as soon as published. 
The driver, who had travelled widely, and become 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 257 

conversant with the most elaborate cuisines of Denver 
and Salt Lake City, declared that even in those luxu- 
rious capitals this " outfit " was not to be surpassed. 

After tea, while the fresh horses were getting at- 
tached, I wandered a few steps away from the back 
of the station to the springs which gave it its name. 
There were two of them, side by side — one, a white 
sulphur, of strength and flavor almost exactly resem- 
bling the Clifton water in Ontario County, State of 
New York ; the other, more of the Kentucky Blue 
Lick type, but much more intense. The first I found 
very agreeable. I felt sorry that the rest of the party 
abhorred all such springs alike, for this was deliciously 
cold and limpid, beside being free from the saline and 
alkaline properties which were to make most of the 
springs henceforth, until we reached California, nau- 
seous or wholly undrinkable. Though an epicure in 
the matter of mineral water, being very fond even of 
Blue Lick, I was obliged to confess that I could not 
drink the second spring. It was fairly saturated with 
sulphide of hydrogen, and had numerous other dis- 
tinguishable flavors as badly intense, none of which 
I recognized save the chalybeate. 

Shortly after we left Sulphur Springs, the moon 
rose, now near her full. As long as I could keep my 
eyes open, I sat on the box. The country was a 
congeries of bare round hills, receding and rising on 
either hand to mountain ranges, transverse to that 
which we had penetrated at Bridger's Pass. It was 
difficult to imagine that we were still in the very 
thick of the mountain system, and at an elevation at 
least as high as Laramie Plains. The stupendous 
scale upon which this system is constructed, con- 
stantly prevents the traveller fi:om realizing where 



258 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

he is. Not till he has climbed over many ridges, and 
penetrated many passes, does he understand that his 
descent over the one or his emerging from the other 
is only equivalent to the entrance upon another lofty 
plateau, — a plain raised upon the very summit of the 
mountains themselves, — or into a basin formed by the 
inosculation of several separate mountain-crests. The 
ridges which bound the plateau or the basin recede 
so as to lose their prominence in the landscape ; and 
until one reaches the spot where they curve together 
again, or encounters some new range which forms a 
boundary .to the comparative level he has been trav- 
elling, he might easily suppose he had reached a low- 
land tract, and got out of the mountains altogether. 
There is no more appropriate name for the Eocky 
Mountain system than to call it a chain, and to no 
other mountain system is the term equally applicable. 
The traveller crossing one of its basins or plateaus is 
inside a link ; a break in one of these links is a pass 
or canon. As he goes through this break, he enters 
another link, belonging to another parallel and lower 
or higher series. Not until he descends to Salt Lake 
City through that tremendous system of connecting 
canons which breaks through the Wahsatch, can he 
say that he has crossed the Rocky Mountains. In 
some places along the system one line of links, in 
some others all but one, disappear entirely ; but any- 
where on the United States line between New Mexico 
and the Great South Pass, the interoceanic traveller 
must cross a parallel series of them amounting to a 
score or more. One of these links is sometimes 
found to be constructed of a single line of upheaval, 
curving from its very origin ; but the link oftenest 
seems to have been constructed by two separate sets 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 259 

of uplifts, operating at as many periods of disturbance : 
one, which we may call the primary, elevating the 
axial ranges of the Continent, whose principal trend is 
north and south ; and the other, which we may call 
the secondary, operating subsequently between the 
parallel lines of the first uplift, with a general trend 
at right angles to it. The first upheaval produced a 
mountain region about six hundred miles wide at its 
widest part, with lofty valleys between its highest 
ranges. The second barred these valleys at intervals, 
turning them into the present plateaus or basins, and 
completing the link formation which we now see. 

Though not entirely limited in its occurrence to 
the Rocky Mountains, this formation is strikingly 
characteristic of that system, and is nowhere else so 
constant a trait both of scenery and geology. Upon 
its existence depend the most important results to 
the future settlement of the interior. Wherever 
these transverse bars occur, it will instantly appear 
that the ease of irrigating the levels between the ax- 
ial ranges is vastly enhanced. Many of them rise to 
a height as great as that of the longitudinal ranges ; 
some of them are higher than those in their imme- 
diate neighborhood. They condense the moisture of 
the upper atmosphere currents, turn it into snow, and 
thus become reservoirs of irrigation — storehouses of 
fertility for the included levels below. 

Any good map constructed after the latest surveys, 
but the maps of the War Department especially, will 
exhibit the link formation with peculiar clearness in 
many different portions of the range, but in none 
more strikingly than in the tract lying between 38° 
and 41° lat. N. and 105° and 107° Ion. W. Within 
these boundaries lie three great links, whose interior 



260 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT.' 

basins possess a fertility of soil, a grandeur and beauty 
of scenery, and a loveliness of climate which fasci- 
nated explorers long before the discovery of the pre- 
cious metals allured them to the interior of the Con- 
tinent, and which now cause them to be better known 
than almost any part of the Rocky Mountain system, 
save that in the immediate vicinity of mines. These 
go by the titles of the North, Middle, and South 
Parks. Their isolation from each other is almost 
complete ; the transverse ridge dividing the Middle 
from the South Park being quite impenetrable, 
while a water-shed of gentler ascent and more broken 
lines separate the former from the North Park. The 
resemblance which these formations bear to the links 
of a chain strike one instantly on looking at the map. 
Not less striking is the amount of water shed into 
each of the inclosed basins from the snow-ridges 
which form its rim. The amount furnished by direct 
rain-falls is inconsiderable, — during some years al- 
most literally nothing, — and may be left out of the 
calculation. North Park will be observed to possess 
a system of irrigation so complete and so bountiful 
that art could scarcely improve it. Innumerable 
tributaries, shed from its walls in every direction, 
unite to make the North Fork of Platte, which was 
separated from us as we crossed Laramie Plains only 
by the single range of black hills on our left, and 
which, after flowing around the base of that grand 
mesa on which the Laramie Plains lie, makes another 
grand detour, and reaches the Great Plain at Fort 
Laramie, a degree further north than where we left 
them. Another system of tributaries combines to 
the southerly, and sheds itself through a break in the 
southwest corner of the link, under the name of the 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 261 

Blue River — contributing one important affluent to 
that mysterious stream which, after traversing one of 
the least known and most savage regions of the 
world, finally empties itself into the Gulf of Califor- 
nia under the title of the Colorado River. A short 
inspection of the hydrography of this region will 
show us that the true division between the North 
and Middle Parks occurs in the line of the water- 
shed between the tributaries of the North Platte and 
those of the Blue. The latter river, it will also ap- 
pear, receives the entire drainage of the Middle Park 
— an amount of water almost wholly derived from the 
snow-meltings of the tremendous ranges inclosing the 
park, yet equal to that of any tract of corresponding 
area under the moist sky of our Atlantic slope. The 
South Park gives birth to the South Platte and the 
Arkansas — both unfailing streams, though they re- 
ceive no affluents of any size within a hundred miles 
of their source. The Cache la Poudre (through whose 
pass, it will be recollected, we ascended to the Laramie 
Plateau) is the first tributary of noticeable volume 
belonging to the South Platte ; yet the latter stream 
is an abundant and rapid river long before it receives 
this increment, indeed in the immediate neighborhood 
of Denver. 

Still further to the north than the Parks lie two 
examples of the link formation in Laramie Plains and 
the plateau of the Great South Pass. I have indi- 
cated, as it occurred in the order of our itinerary, the 
longitudinal and transverse ranges which environ the 
former. North of the Wind River Mountains, the 
transverse range which forms its lower boundary, 
lies an irregular plateau to which the South Pass 
furnishes its main western exit, of much vaster ex- 



262 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

tent than those we have been considering, yet belong- 
ing equally with them to the link system. Within 
this link rise the Snake Fork of the Columbia (or, as 
we may properly say, the Columbia itself, the Snake 
deserving the honor of consideration as the main 
stream), the Yellowstone, and the Missouri. This 
link is the Delphi of our Continent's physical geog- 
raphy, the ofKpaTiOg yyjg, since from it, as a nodal tract, 
flow the two chief streams of North America, the one 
sending its waters to the Gulf of Mexico, the other 
emptying into the North Pacific Ocean ; their cradling 
fountains separated from each other by a narrow 
ridge, and their graves in the all-swallowing sea dis- 
tant from each other 2,225 miles in an air line. 

The link formation is exhibited everywhere in the 
Eocky Mountains. It is not only the type on which 
has been constructed every great tract of plateau or 
basin country like those just considered, but the 
traveller is constantly finding it repeated on a smaller 
or even a miniature scale. Thus, the famous gold- 
leads of Colorado lie environed on the north and 
south sides by walls belonging to the transverse sys- 
tem of uplifts ; their west boundary is the giant wall 
of the Middle Park itself; from the west side of this 
wall flows a tributary to the Blue River, the Colo- 
rado, and the Gulf of California ; from its eastern face 
comes Clear Creek, the famous stream that, after sup- 
plying the mines, runs to the Platte, and finally reaches 
the Gulf of Mexico : the springs of the two streams 
are divided by a single snow bank. " Ogden's Hole " 
is a tract lying in similar environment among uplifts 
of the Wahsatch, diflering so much between them- 
selves in point of geological period, that immediately 
adjoining the granite and sandstone of the main 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 263 

range are found much disturbed strata of the carbon- 
iferous series, which may become of immense value 
when the Pacific Eailroad, with its locomotives, its ma- 
chine-shops, and the increase of population following 
in its wake, shall demand and justify the development 
of Utah's internal resources. 

In the mutual relations of the longitudinal and 
transverse systems of uplift lies a field of study no 
less important than interesting. Their relative ages ; 
their conterminous points, or, where such cannot be 
made out, their tracts of transition into each other ; 
the facts as to the existence of the precious metals in 
both or in one only, and if the latter, then in which 
one, — these are merely passing hints for a line of in- 
vestigation which cannot fail to be fruitful of most 
valuable results. 

This episode upon the link formation has its close 
connection with our itinerary, though I seemed to 
wander away from it just after leaving Sulphur 
Springs. 

Descending from the water-shed, we had emerged 
through the magnificent gallery of Bridger's Pass into 
a tract which forms another link, not until now men- 
tioned by me as such, of the same type as all the 
others, and nearly the same longitudinal system as 
that of the South Pass plateau. From that plateau 
we were now divided by the Wind River Mountains, 
and their continuation on a smaller scale along the 
Sweetwater. This transverse range formed the north- 
ern segment of our link. The Uintah range, and its 
continuations along the line of the Yampah, formed 
a corresponding segment on the south. With these 
the Wahsatch range inosculated on the west, and on 
the east the parallel longitudinal range which we had 



264 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

just penetrated by way of Bridger's Pass. The area 
thus bounded has but a single system of drainage : it 
contains the source of the Colorado, and every drop 
of its water goes to swell that stream. 

Fremont's Peak may be called the western corner- 
stone of the wall formed by the Wind River Moun- 
tains along the south boundary of the South Pass 
Plateau. From the southern base of this corner- 
stone, and thus separated only by a single range from 
the drainage area which begets the Columbia, the 
Missouri, and the Yellowstone, springs another river, 
as remarkable as either of the former two, and, al- 
though lacking their commercial importance, destined 
to traverse an extent of country surpassed by the 
Missouri alone among all the rivers of North Amer- 
ica. This stream is the Rio Colorado of the Califor- 
nian Gulf, here at its fountain-head called the Green. 
From its springs to the mingling of its waters with 
the ocean, the distance measured in an air line is, for 
the Columbia, 650 miles ; for the Colorado, 850 ; and 
for the Missouri, 1,750 We have seen that the short- 
est distance between the Columbia's and the Missou- 
ri's junction with the sea is 2,225 miles. By similar 
measurement the waters of the Green or Colorado 
reach the sea 1,520 miles from those of the Missouri, 
and 1,140 miles from those of the Columbia. Yet it 
is not improbable that in the neighborhood of Fre- 
mont's Peak (or about 44° lat. N. 112° Ion. W.) 
there exist, upon an area no larger than an ordinary 
Eastern States' county, springs contributing to each 
one of these great rivers. It will be evident from the 
extreme tortuosity of all three, that a measurement 
made " as the crow flies " gives but a very inadequate 
idea of their length, or the vast surfaces which they 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 265 

lay under contribution. A juster conception of the 
Colorado may be acquired by observing that not only 
the entire area within this mighty link now surround- 
ing us, but nearly the whole of the vast territory south- 
ward of us to the New Mexican line, and westward 
to the Sierra, contributes to this river all its water, 
with the exception of such streams as are swallowed 
out of sight by the " sinks " of the thirsty desert. 

During the night, whenever I woke with a jerk 
from the feverish sleep of an Overland traveller, I 
could perceive the same features which characterized 
the landscape soon after we left the Sulphur Springs. 
The gray woolly-looking hills lay like the backs of a 
Cyclopean flock of sheep rounded in slumber and 
huddled as far as the eye could reach under a misty 
moonlight. Sometimes, though rarely, a wretched 
cedar, the victim of misplaced confidence, had estab- 
lished itself in a chink to struggle for life with sage 
brush and grease wood; but these latter and the 
gramma-grass ruled the arid region, dressing it out 
in one broad melancholy Quaker monotone which 
even the moon was not able to e^herealize. The 
Florida moss is exquisitely beautiful in moonlight ; 
indeed, when it festoons a circle of noble old live- 
oaks, it will make out of noonday a moonlight of its 
own for one inside the pavilion, by filtering the yel- 
low glare through itself, and turning it to silver ; but 
there one has at least some bright green for a con- 
trast, and the moss, moreover, in its shape is graceful 
beyond all flattery. Fancy a world of moss and 
nothing else ; fancy that moss formed like a dry hay- 
cock stuck raggedly on a gnarled stump three feet 
high ; then you will have this sage brush, and a land- 
scape which Genius itself could not beautify. 



266 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Fifty-one miles of rolling country, broken by noth- 
ing remarkable in the way either of scene or adven- 
ture, brought us about 8 a. m. to a station called La 
Clede. Upon consulting our itinerary we found that 
during the night we had passed our half-way mark 
between the Missouri and our California terminus at 
Placerville. For the benefit of future travellers I will 
state that this midway point occurred just half a mile 
west of the Duck Lake Station. We were now 983 
miles from our journey's beginning, 930 from its end, 
and 272 from Salt Lake City. 

While we were changing horses at La Clede, we 
loaded our fowling-pieces, and, after a walk of some 
forty rods into the sage brush, succeeded in starting 
up a flock of sage-fowl, and bagged three. They were 
in fine plump condition, but we had no desire to haz- 
ard the experiment of roast chicken with wormwood, 
even had there been time to stop and cook our game. 
Accordingly, we set about preserving the only part 
valuable to science, namely, the skins, leaving the 
meat for the coyotes. In this instance, as one among 
many, we had to return sincere thanks to Ben Holla- 
day and Mr. Otis his superintendent, for the kindness 
shown us by an extension of courtesies in general, and 
an open letter in particular, calling on the drivers to 
halt half an hour at a time whenever we wished it to 
facilitate our scientific examinations and notes, the 
taking of sketches, and the collection and preparation 
of specimens. By the time our leave to halt was ex- 
hausted we had succeeded in getting a clean pair of 
skins (an adult cock and heix^f, without making a tear 
or losing a feather. Having rubbed them thoroughly 
with arsenical soap, we folded them as neatly as pos- 
sible, tied them up in an India rubber bag, and 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 267 

stowed them under our seats, where they rode very 
comfortably to us as well as safely to themselves, un- 
til we reached California. The air of the Plains and 
Mountains is so dry and free from ozone that a nicely 
cleaned skin would run but little risk of becoming 
offensive even without the soap ; but neither soap nor 
India rubber demand much room ; and when a speci- 
men is as rare as one of these birds, which it requires 
a journey into the very heart of a continent to get, 
every precaution should be taken. Before we left 
Denver, I had employed a rainy afternoon in the 
manufacture of bags for the preservation of delicate 
specimens, both botanical and zoological ; using the 
India rubber cloth with which we had provided our- 
selves in New York, of a quality used for the lighter 
description of water-proof capes, and in quantity 
amounting to twelve yards. When I bought it, I 
feared that I was a little finical, and perhaps resem- 
bled those Cockney travellers w^ho take marmalade 
and folding bath-tubs with them across the Sahara ; 
but in fact it proved one of the most remunerative 
purchases of our outfit. It served us as many valu- 
able turns as it does citizens who tarry at home. It 
rolled into very small compass, scarcely exceeding an 
umbrella in bulk, and was in constant requisition. It 
covered note-books and sketch-books when we were 
fording streams which splashed us from head to foot ; 
it made excellent surtouts for leather rifle-covers; 
and it was invaluable as an air and water tight en- 
velope to some plants which are equally ruined by 
soaking or desiccation. Negatively as well as affirm- 
atively I afterward learned how to appreciate it, 
when it had all been used up, and I was compelled 
to expose one of the most gorgeous collections of 



268 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Lepidoptera I ever saw in any cabinet to the search- 
ing, dry atmosphere of a CaUfornia midsummer, with 
no protection but a cedar box ; on opening which I 
found a few mummied bodies, minus legs, antennae, 
and siphons, together with a httle heap of irridescent 
powder to represent what had once been rainbow 
banners, court-suits for the pages of Queen Titania ; 
animated sweet-pea blossoms from Paradise : or if you 
will have the vernacular, butterflies' wings ! Every 
collector of specimens in a wild country needs India 
rubber bags ; and everybody with the least " gump- 
tion," and a pair of pocket-scissors or a penknife, 
can make them. I have made many a one whose 
adhesiveness proved perfectly satisfactory, simply by 
scraping away the cotton lining of the surface I 
wished to join, breathing on them and pressing them 
firmly together. A still closer and more artistic joint 
may be made with a special glue sold at the stores 
for that purpose, but which anybody can imitate by 
preparing a viscid solution (a little thicker than the 
thickest molasses) of pure gum caoutchouc in ether 
or sulphide of carbon. If you can carry this with 
the certainty of not having it spill out, it will prove 
very convenient. It sticks like pitch, and, as its sol- 
vents are not always at hand, may make a dreadful 
mess of clothes, books, or papers ; though I have 
carried it thousands of miles without an accident. It 
should be kept in a box with a screw cover. 

During the day I had frequent occasion to regret 
the hurried rate at which our limited time compelled 
us to pass through this region. The area we trav- 
ersed had evidently been the scene of frequent and 
varied geological disturbances. The strata which out- 
cropped among the round gray hills were of widely 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 269 

different lithological characters and widely separated 
periods. The hydrographic plan of the region was 
simple enough, having reference, as I have said, to the 
single drainage system of Colorado (Green) River. 
We passed, however, indications of a former entirely 
different distribution of the affluents ; wide areas of 
water-rolled pebbles, sterile as a quarry, and pre- 
cipitous cliffs guarding the plainly defined bed of a 
river which had once rolled at their base. Near the 
station of Rock Point, in a friable, ferruginous sand- 
stone, I discovered well preserved casts and some 
fossil fragments of Ostracidae which I referred to 
Gri/phcea, and, in another bed of shaly texture, frag- 
ments of what I supposed to be an Inoceramus. I 
believe that a special survey of this entire link would 
abundantly repay the geologist. The precipitous line 
of river bluffs which marked the dry bottom had an 
extent of several miles, and were in some places as 
hiorh as the Palisades of the Hudson. I much rearretted 
having no time to go to them, but at the distance of 
about a mile and a half (our nearest approach) they 
appeared to belong to a sandstone period, probably 
of the cretaceous era. All day the same desolation 
marked the Flora of the landscape ; grease wood, 
artemisia, and an occasional stinted cedar being the 
only shrubby vegetation. 

On the levels strewn with water-worn pebbles I 
observed that the surface was changing almost hourly 
under the operation of the winds and sand. Within 
a few minutes I observed several sand dunes con- 
structed, and several others removed, — both classes 
being cones of several feet in height. Several times 
we passed remarkable indications of the fact that at no 
very remote period, possibly since the commencement 



270 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of white immigration to this region, the buffalo has 
existed on this side of the Rocky Mountain water- 
shed. At present his furthest range reaches only with- 
in the lower line of ridges on the eastern slope of the 
system, — individuals of the tribe being occasionally 
shot in the canons of Colorado, but none having been 
known by the present inhabitants to pass the first 
snow-range. Several old hunters and trackers of 
large experience, whose acquaintance I formed in 
Colorado, believed in the existence of a separate 
species of bison, peculiar to the mountains, charac- 
terized by greater size than the Plains animal, and 
still further differing from those congeners in their 
stationary habits, remaining in the mountain fast- 
nesses all the year round, instead of emigrating south- 
ward with the approach of winter. Furthermore, the 
habits of this supposed species were solitary. They 
were never met in herds, and in couples only during 
the marital season. At one time I was almost led by 
the accounts which I received into the belief that 
the animal described by hunters who had killed spe- 
cimens in the range, was neither more nor less than a 
stray from that exceedingly interesting family which 
finds its usual habitat in the barrens of a much more 
northerly portion of our Continent ; namely, that con- 
necting link between the Bovidge (already, as repre- 
sented by the bison, manifesting a wide departure 
from the typical bull in this same direction) and the 
sheep (as compromised toward the bison in the 
"Bighorn"), the musk-ox, or Ovihos Moschatiis. Re- 
mains of this animal have been found in tertiary beds 
of the Continent much further south than Denver ; 
but having no specimens, and only an unscientific re- 
port to proceed upon, I was obliged to abandon my 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 271 

hypothesis in view of the fact that no living individ- 
ual has been found within the memory of man fur- 
ther south than 60° lat. N. I know of no country 
where a given type of animals has its divisions shaded 
into each other by so complete a series of delicate 
gradations as prevails among the hollow-horned ru- 
minants of North America, taking them in their order 
from the domestic sheep to the domestic cow, through 
the bighorn, the ovibos, and the bison. Indeed, either 
of these three suggests one type nearly as much as 
another. 

The indications of the bison's former passage of 
the Rocky Mountains lie strewn over a wide area. In 
several places along our route within the Green River 
link, I observed skulls of this tribe in excellent pres- 
ervation. In some instances the horns were as entire 
as on the day that the animal was killed ; the apices 
being only slightly rounded. Some of them were in 
the argillaceous deposit of overflows from the tribu- 
taries of the Green ; others projected out of sand 
dunes ; and several lay entirely exposed to sight on 
the denuded and water-worn pebbles of the wide 
tract above referred to. 

The fact of our gradual approach to Salt Lake was 
now indicated increasingly at every stage of our prog- 
ress. We found in every spring the evidence of a for- 
mer submersion of this entire tract beneath the waters 
of a stagnant inland sea. Salt Lake remains as the last 
vestige of a period when the vast estuary which set 
northwesterly from the present boundaries of the 
Gulf of Mexico to the plateau of Snake River, was 
caught by a sudden upheaval of transverse ranges 
which forever shut it up from its connection with 
tide-water, and cut it up, by a series of colossal walls 



272 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

or dams, into a number of minor saline lakes, in all 
respects but size exactly corresponding to the pres- 
ent Great Salt Lake of Utah. The theory of this 
formation, fortunately for the student, has a perfect 
paradigm in that remarkable reservoir; and in the 
proper place I shall show how admirably, yet minutely, 
it explains itself and many neighboring tracts, which, 
but for its survival from the period when it was only 
one of many, might prove obstinate problems to the 
geologist and physical geographer. 

At Rock Point we encountered, for the first time 
since leaving the Nebraska Plains, what in this region 
and at this season was an unusual phenomenon, a 
drenching shower of rain. I would have been glad 
to have caught some of the sky's bounty, had any 
receptacle been at hand, for the spring water found 
at long intervals on our route was exceedingly nau- 
seous. The alkaline water on the eastern side of the 
mountains was bad enough, but this was many grades 
beyond. Much of the soda and potash in the former 
was drawn from vast beds of feldspar, a mineral which 
seems in this climate peculiarly susceptible to decom- 
position, and in many places may be seen rotting 
out of the granite formations into an impalpable pow- 
der. The mineral constituents of the springs we 
now encountered were much more varied and abun- 
dant, embracing chloride of sodium, sulphur and sul- 
phide of hydrogen, iron in the form of chromate and 
peroxide, carbonates of potash and soda, sometimes 
associated with bromine and iodine. The source of 
these was no contemporary decomposition, but the 
beds deposited through an unmeasured period by 
stagnant bodies of salt water, cut off from all means 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 273 

of escape save evaporation and a gradual deposit from 
a super-saturated solution. 

The night after leaving Rock Point was the wildest 
in which I ever travelled. The heavens were pitchy 
black, except in patches where now and then the 
moon succeeded in struggling through a thinner 
layer of clouds to flash on us an instantaneous view 
of our horrible surroundings, drowning in the mid- 
night sea directly after, and leaving us to a worse 
mystery and dread. The wind blew from every point 
in the compass, and would have howled had there 
been anything to howl in, but trees there were none. 
Our way wound over a succession of bare, rocky 
ridges, like the perilous reefs of a sea suddenly 
drained dry. Some of these were two or three hun- 
dred feet above the general level, and as nearly per- 
pendicular as they could be consistently with offering 
any possible foothold and passage to our horses. This 
part of the Overland road abundantly deserves its 
reputation of being the worst between the Missouri 
and Washoe. Like the boy in the song, I did not 
dare to sleep, and went, metaphorically, to walk the 
deck with the pilot. Bracing my feet against the 
dash-board, I saw that remarkable man at my side put 
his six-horse team (we were obliged to take an extra 
pair for this part of the route) over precipices where 
I should as soon have thought of driving over a well- 
curb. Quintus Curtius at $50 a month ! Even he 
acknowledged that he never drove this stage without 
expecting to break his neck. Frequently the valleys 
into which we dove were so narrow and abrupt (I say 
" valleys," though they were mere crevices of dislo- 
cation in perfectly bare rock) that our leaders were 
clawing their way up the slippery sandstone ledges, 

18 



274 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

while ourselves, our wheelers, and the middle team 
were rushing headlong with the weight of the wagon 
almost tumbling on them bodily. In one such place 
the descent was full sixty feet, with a 45'' incline ; and 
the road up the opposite wall of the chasm instead of 
lying in line with that we were descending, turned 
abruptly to one side nearly a full quadrant to avoid a 
precipice tenfold worse than that down which we were 
plunging. Talk of steeple-chases ! A good horseman 
on his own trusty horse knows only the name of fear 
before any leap short of the eaves of a house ; but 
cooped up with six in a box, he might well turn pale 
and be no coward. Save me henceforth from a stee- 
ple-chase in a wagon ! 

Soon after daylight broke we reached the Green 
River. The approach to it was through a picturesque 
canon walled by perpendicular crags of red sandstone 
five or six hundred feet high. This formation was 
several miles in length, and abutted boldly upon the 
river, where its face was weathered into remarkable 
imitations of sculpture similar to that of the Stone- 
Calvin Terrace, down whose giant staircase we had 
carefully crept to the last crossing of the Platte. At 
every turn some colossal profile of Indian, sphinx, 
helmeted warrior, or frowning Afrite projected from 
an outstanding vertical ledge. Often as I have had 
to refer to these strange mimicries of Nature's own 
carving, I cannot refrain from saying here that they 
always took us by surprise ; and that for variety and 
number of profiles, no formation which we anywhere 
found marked by these strange freaks surpassed the 
present one. 

A moment's glance at the Green River reveals the 
reason of its name, although its tinge tends rather 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 275 

toward the olive than to that intense beryl shade 
which characterizes the waters of the Niagara and 
Columbia Rivers. We intersected it at a distance 
from its source (following its sinuosities) of about 125 
miles; and, although we had no means of measuring 
it accurately, I think that its breadth at this point 
cannot much exceed eighty yards. Its banks were 
from twenty-five to forty feet higher than its present 
water level, so that its bed cannot vary laterally to 
any great extent with drought or snow-melting. 

We were ferried across here by the same ingenious 
apparatus as that which passed us over the Platte, 
though the current is rather more sluggish than that 
stream's, and the trips necessarily longer. The river 
at this season apparently averages ten feet in depth 
at mid-stream, though its bottom is very irregular, 
abounding in sliding clay and quicksand, which vary 
the depth from time to time. While the horses were 
changing, I had a chance to test the character of its 
bed. As the gastronomer and commissary of the 
party, I had measured out our rations of canned sweet 
corn and tomatoes, and intrusted them for prepara- 
tion to a woman at the station-house who had gained 
my confidence by her wholesome tidy look, no less 
than the assertion that she had just arrived here from 
the East, (Fort Leavenworth !) and was well acquainted 
with that kind of victuals. While breakfast was pre- 
paring under her auspices, I strolled a short distance 
down the river in search of any specimens that might 
offer. Scrambling down the bank in one place, I saw 
what seemed a firm promontory of hard-baked clay 
stretching out several feet from the base of the 
bolder river wall, and just beyond its point a lizard- 
like reptile, which might be the very new Siredon by 



276 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

whose discovery I was waiting to distinguish myself. 
Fortunately fame has not so much fascination for me 
as a dry skin, to say nothing of a live one, so I felt 
my ground with one foot fast. The promontory 
proved to be of the consistency of soft soap, my mere 
experimental pressure bogging my boot in it nearly 
up to the knee ; and when for the sake of future trav- 
ellers possibly with less experience, together with a 
just vengeance for the dirty trick it had well-nigh 
played me, I gave it a few vigorous kicks at its junc- 
tion with the bank, it fell off, and dissolved away into 
a sort of milky emulsion, which went down with the 
current like so much suds. It was the finest argilla- 
ceous silt I ever saw assuming coherency, and I saw 
several other instances of the same formation on 
tributaries of the same stream. Emigrants lose many 
cattle every year in this deceitful ooze, the poor creat- 
ures running into it mad with thirst after a long 
day's drive over a springless tract, or, what is still 
worse, a tract whose springs are alkaline and sa- 
line. Even the more experienced cattle of perma- 
nent settlers along the banks of similar streams are 
frequently betrayed by the substantial look of the 
slough ; and the boldness of the true margin, together 
with the rapidity of the current, renders it almost an 
impossibility to save them. I found here an excellent 
illustration of the process which has preserved for us 
so many elephants of the tertiary and earlier Adamic 
ages. I have no doubt that an industrious overhaul- 
ing of all the plainly marked river beds which exist 
in this region at the foot of palisades whose base has 
not been wet for centuries would abundantly repay 
the paloeontologist, furnish to cabinets the finest col- 
lections in the world, not only of duplicates to the 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 277 

extinct specimens already known, but possibly of spe- 
cies entirely new to science, and settle the now very 
uncertain original boundaries of the entire tribe 
of American ruminants. Yet more: it might throw 
much light on the very curious fact yearly receiving 
new illustrations, that the American Fauna is chrono- 
logically far in the rear of that belonging to the Old 
World. The eminent entomologist. Dr. Loew of Mese- 
ritz, in Prussia, has discovered that a number of very 
singular and interesting insects belonging to the pa- 
laeontology of Europe, and immemorially extinct there, 
exist as living species in our North American forests. 
It may not be straining the analogy too far to conjec- 
ture that higher tribes than the Diptera found in am- 
ber, existed on this Continent long after they had 
become obsolete in the other ; even, for example, 
that the gigantic saurians of the Jurassic survived 
into our tertiary, and that tertiary pachyderms of 
Europe, or yet undiscovered congeners of theirs, roved 
the emerging lacustrine beds, and got bogged in the 
treacherous fluviatile silt of our earlier Adamic pe- 
riod. The unavoidable rapidity of my journey 
through this most interesting tract, and my conse- 
quent inability to offer anything better than hints 
for the thorough workman who shall come after me 
when a Pacific Railroad insures the safe transport 
of specimens, and puts the time of explorers entirely 
at their own disposal, must save from scientific con- 
tempt these crude and unsupported suggestions. 

Getting back to breakfast, I found that my confi- 
dence had not been misplaced. The nice, tidy East- 
ern woman from Leavenworth had done full justice 
to our provisions, and added further blessedness to the 
repast by the first bowl of rich fresh milk and dish of 



278 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

new-laid eggs we had tasted since leaving Denver. 
While we were breakfasting with a relish, one of our 
fellow-passengers at the same board vouchsafed a re- 
mark about the Mormons, to the effect that we were 
rapidly nearing their kingdom, with a little half-jocose 
warning against the danger of having one's throat 
cut. A sunburnt, taciturn young man, who appar- 
ently belonged at the station as a " herder," or sta- 
ble-helper, looked up furtively from under a pair of 
shaggy black eyebrows, took the speaker in with a 
quick but comprehensive glance, and, without having 
been noticed by more than one besides myself, pro- 
ceeded impassively with his ham and eggs. After 
we rose from the table, and paid our dollar a head for 
our really excellent breakfast (the price invariably 
charged us since we entered the Mountains, without 
regard to the large portion of every meal furnished 
from our own private stores, and not exorbitant con- 
sidering the immense distance which every staple 
article has to be hauled by the Overland supply 
wagons) we strolled out to the corral, and got into 
conversation with our next driver. Our jocular fel- 
low-passenger was nearer " the kingdom " than he 
knew. We were in Utah. Our maps had not indi- 
cated the last few miles of the route by which we 
had come to Green River, and we had crossed the 
stream at a point different from our previous calcula- 
tion ; in other words, near the point of its intersection 
with the one hundred and tenth parallel, where it 
coincides with the eastern boundary line of Utah. 
I had not expected to recognize Utah by any unerr- 
ing sign ; to know when I came to it by a polyga- 
mistic flavor in the atmosphere ; but I own that the 
sensation of entering Mormondom without knowing 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 279 

it was somewhat singular. My own party were all 
too old travellers to have been in any danger of mak- 
ing such an unguarded self-committal as that of our 
fellow-passenger at the breakfast table, but for many 
reasons we felt securer for the knowledge where we 
were. 

" Never been in Utah afore, I reckon ? " said the 
driver half interrogatively. 

" No nearer than the Wind River Mountains." 

*'They don't have many o' them fellows up there?" 

" What fellows ? " 

" Why, these here Mormons." 

There was a slighting tone in his voice which we 
could not fail to recognize as an assumption. If he 
had meant to speak disparagingly out of a sincere 
heart, he was too old a hand to select such entire 
strangers for his confidants. Fortunately we were no 
younger, and '^'^ smoked''' him at once without showing 
that we did. He was throwing out feelers. 

" You don't seem to like them much, judging from 
your tone," said I. " That's unfortunate, seeing you 
have to drive thirty or forty miles every day in their 
country. But you just use them well, and go your 
own way quietly, — you'll never get anything but 
good treatment from them. If you're a new hand 
here, as I should judge you are, take an old travel- 
ler's advice, and always think half a dozen times be- 
fore you speak once. If you should happen to be 
overheard talking about Mormons in such a tone by 
that tall young man with the bushy eyebrows who 
sat opposite me at breakfast, you'd be spotted at once, 
and it might make no end of trouble for you all along 
the road. You know whom I mean — that brown- 
complexioned young Mormon : what's his name ? " 



280 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

We looked him in the face without flinching ; he 
looked at both of us with undisguised perplexity, and, 
as I put the question, answered involuntarily, — 

" Cowperthwaite ! ^ Well — why — why — how did 
you know he was a Mormon ? " 

" D'ye remember how the girl knew her father ? 
Jest as easy ! How do I know you are one ? The same 
way." 

" Well, ihafs so ! No use o' concealin' on it as I 
know. I aint ashamed o't, — you bet ! But d — d if 
you aint a queer 'un ? You beat my time, anyhow. 
Wall, I'm glad to see you're so friendly — give us yer 
hand." 

" We're friends to everybody that's civil and oblig- 
ing — that goes straight ahead minding his own busi- 
ness well, and letting other people mind theirs. 
That's the only way to get on in this world, driver." 

This colloquy not only afforded us the amusement 
of beating a man at his own game, but resulted in the 
greatest convenience to us practically. Without du- 
plicity or the need of insuring ourselves against all 
risk by exaggerated professions of good-will to every 
new acquaintance we were brought into contact with, 
we were immediately crossed off the list of suspects, 
and had no further anxiety regarding jealous miscon- 
struction or disagreeable espionage. We took an early 
occasion to warn our incautious fellow-passenger, a 
little Swiss, who was going out to Washoe to form a 
watch-making partnership with a brother who had 
preceded him to this country by several years. When 
he heard he had got into Utah without knowing it, 
his knees smote together at the memory of the morn- 
ing's indiscretion; his jolly round face paled to the 

1 I give a fictitious name, of course. 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 281 

hue of the Jungfrau summit ; his broken English de- 
serted him entirely, and he fell back on his French. 

" Mon Dieu ! ce n'^tait qu'une de mes petites plais- 
anteries ! seulement 9a, — seulement, seulement — pa- 
role d'honneur ! Je n'ai point de prejuges, moi ! Toute 
ma famille, nous sommes francs-penseurs — mon frere 
aine est Voltairien. Ventrebleu ! un des plus pre^mi- 
nens! Je suis Philosophe, — je ne crois rien de tout. 
Adolphe (c'est notre cadet la), il n'a que vingt ans et 
ses liaisons montent jusqu'a deux fois ce numer5 ! il 
est vrai libertin — vrai Don Giovanni ! Moi je n'ai 
point de prejuges — quant aux Mormons, de mon en- 
fance j'ai eprouv^ pour ces braves gens des sentimens 
les plus respecteuses, les plus affectionees. Que voulez- 
vous ? Une femme, deux femmes, trois, quatre, cinq, 
cent, mil — c'est egal ! Mais quoi ! Si je resterais a 
SaltrLac — je ne me generais pas par I'arithmetique — 
je me marie rais, je vous le jure ! deux fois par mois 
— regulier-r-r-r-ement ! " 

I now had to caution him against error in the oppo- 
site direction, lest, in singing the praises of polygamy, 
he should rush into such burlesque as to bring him- 
self into worse suspicion. I could see, at succeeding 
stations along the road, that the beetle-browed young 
man had not failed to send his " character " ahead of 
him. He was eyed sharply ; but as we took him to 
a certain extent under the wing of our party, he es- 
caped trouble, — the excuse that he was a Frenchman, 
and ignorant of our free institutions (from bigamy up- 
ward), also procuring him a certain amount of clem- 
ency. A more thoroughly frightened man I never 
saw in my life. His idea of a Mormon was Dantesque 
in its horror — an elaborate incarnation of all the 
choicest varieties of atrocious cruelty, ingenious dis- 



282 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

honesty, blasphemous impiety, satyrian immodesty, 
and quintessential wickedness, loved, sought after, 
practiced for its own dear, radical, and unassisted 
sake; a compound of three parts Balfour of Burley, 
a dozen of some bandit chieftain of the Abruzzi, ten 
of Autolycus, fifty of Caligula, five hundred of Si- 
lenus, and the remainmg equivalents in a scale of 
thousands belonging to the old original Sathanas 
himself Seven hundred miles of horse-travel through 
ninety-six thousand monsters compounded after form- 
ula ! fancy the agony of a poor little Swiss who had 
that before him, with half his worldly fortune in 
French Louis-d'or gg-lling his ribs in a sort of India 
rubber pack-saddle (Paris patent), and the other half 
in San Francisco credits, covered with sheets also of 
rubber, and sewed up within the lining of his coat ! 
I may forget him if I leave his conclusion to fall into 
its proper chronology ; so I will skip ahead with him, 
and give him his definite dismissal in a few words. 

Having come to regard our protection as his only 
salvation, he altered his original plan of going on to 
Washoe night and day, sans arrete, and stayed over 
with us during the time we spent in Brigham's capital. 

We resumed our journey at the peril of our lives, 
the whole Desert at that time reeking with massacre. 
Here our horrors began. For three hundred miles 
we rode expecting death in every canon. But the 
Indian had no terrors for poor little Foiedelis. The 
stoutest hearts that beat in our breasts were heavy as 
lead, and we thought a great deal of our mothers and 
sisters and wives. But the face of Foiedelis, with 
every league that put Salt Lake further behind, grew 
more and more like a wilted pippin under an ex- 
hausted receiver. We reached Ruby Valley one 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 283 

afternoon at sundown. We climbed from the mili- 
tary post at that point through Hastings' Pass, up 
the tremendous eastern slope of the first range of the 
Humboldt Mountains. It was after midnight when 
our last panting relay stopped to breathe on the sum- 
mit round of that wonderful scaling ladder of the Ti- 
tans. Under the unflickering stars of that vaporless 
upper firmament we seemed unbosomed, purged of all 
care, — so close to them that their measureless quiet 
and endurance looked clear down into us, read us, 
knew us, soothed us like children who had come 
home to them from prodigal wanderings in the desert 
of the world below. Set the White Mountains there ! 
the flattered, the boasted of the East. The star-shad- 
ows of our lower ridge would eclipse them; taken 
into the shelter of a sublimity which merged them 
with its flanking foot-hills, they would be obliterated 
as independent existences, yet have glory enough in 
swelling a grandeur by which it is no shame to be 
conquered. From this height of vision we seemed to 
see half a world — the globe around and down to its 
very girdle. It was the grandest night-sight I ever 
saw in nature. We had well-nigh forgotten the hor- 
rors out of which we had now climbed forever. Our 
hearts seemed to beat close against the everlasting 
youth of the heavens ; we could not think of the im- 
minent slaughter skulking with us three days ago 
through steppes of dazzling, blistering sand and 
gnarled, funereal wormwood ; probable slaughter yes- 
terday ; possible slaughter all day long to-day. Life, 
life, everlasting life, fresh distilled for our first breath- 
ing, right out of the loving heaven itself; dew from 
the nectaries of amaranth and asphodel, to wipe from 
the anxious wrinkles of heart and brow the dust 



284 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

which the sirocco had powdered on us from the leaves 
of the wormwood. 

But, lest we should forget devout thanksgiving in 
the levity of mere selfish safety and boastful joy, 
sudden reminders of the greatness of our salvation 
catch our eyes as we bend them eastward over the 
night-empurpled immensity of the far-down desert. 
Not meant as such reminders — ah, no ! though the' 
grateful heart turns all evilest things out of their evil- 
est purpose into goodness and blessing, as the sun 
melts the very offal of the world into mother liquor 
for precious crystals and life-blood for flowers of Eden. 
The Goshoot devils, who have been dogging our steps 
with the arrow and tomahawk, are lighting up their sig- 
nal fires on the black porphyry crags which rise from 
the floor of the desert. Like eyes of baffled fiends, 
they wink up at us out of the dark, opening, one after 
the other, till more than a score gleam balefully be- 
tween our mighty mountain citadel and the far hori- 
zon. But we are forever out of the demons' clutches. 
We have passed the hostile boundary, we have climbed 
the tremendous barrier, and the key to our stronghold 
is held by a sturdy garrison of Californians, thousands 
of feet below in the Ruby Valley post. Each man re- 
joices after his temperament : one thanks God qui- 
etly ; another utters a deep sigh of relief as for the 
first time in days he slings his rifle over his head, and 
shuts his eyes to sleep ; another whirls his slouch 
about his head, breaking into cheers and song. Only 
Eoiedelis remains stolid amid the general joy. Some- 
body has told him that he is not yet out of Utah, 
though he is out of the Goshoots. He will not halloo 
till he gets out of the woods. So he waits. When 
the day dawns, — when we cross the second ridge, go 




BUFFALO CHARGE. 




ATTACK OF PANTllEU. 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 285 

through Chokup Pass, are at once over the 116th 
parallel and the Nevada line, — then our little Switzer 
has his o^vn private jubilee in his own original way. 
While we stop to change horses he dances a pas-seul, 
which fills a family of Digger Indians, pensioning on 
the station-keeper, with admiration and dismay ; he 
snaps his fingers ; he shakes his fist to the eastward 
in sublime menace to a whole Territory at once ; and 
finally, having expended the bottled feelings of the 
last three weeks, he rejoins us, wiping the perspira- 
tion from his face with a handkerchief. 

The fact of meeting Mormons on the instant of 
stepping foot into the Territory did not surprise us, 
for we had by no means waited so long as this to 
make their first acquaintance on the Overland road. 
They are strewn all along from the Missouri River to 
San Francisco. Some of them are avowed, others 
known only to the initiated, others undoubtedly not 
known at all. A Mormon and his wife formerly kept 
the station at Liberty Farm, one hundred and ninety- 
three miles west of Atchison. Several of them I 
have known among drivers, numbers among stable- 
helpers and stock-tenders. They are, so far as I 
know, unblamable in the discharge of their duties ; in 
fact, they must attend to their business as well as 
anybody obtainable for their places, or they would 
not be kept twenty-four hours under the strict re- 
gime of Ben Holladay. None of them are out of Utah 
in disgrace ; they keep up their relations with the 
Church government as closely as ever. They are 
detailed to duty on the Church's behalf. Their ene- 
mies call them by the invidious name of spies. It 
is certainly the case, that, by some means or other, 
nothing happens along the great avenues to Salt Lake, 



286 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of which Brigham Young does not get the earliest 
advices. He is never surprised at the arrival of any 
person in his capital. Long before your arrival is an- 
nounced in the " Deseret News," he has a memoran- 
dum of your name, your residence, your appearance, 
your circumstances, your purpose in coming to Utah, 
your intended length of stay there, and (unless you 
are enough of an old traveller to know " a pump " 
at first sight, and keep your likes and dislikes to 
yourself in all promiscuous companies) your animus 
towards Mormonism, your value as an ally, and the 
importance of providing against you, or propitiat- 
ing you if you are a foe. The secret police system 
of France was never more efficient than Brigham 
Young's ; and, considering the much vaster territory 
that lies under his organized espionage, I might be 
justified in saying that in efficiency none ever equaled 
his. As a ruler of men, I think the earth has scarcely 
had his peer. The "one-man power" system is hasten- 
ing towards its final extinction, but its last days are 
its greatest. It dies giving birth to two of its grandest 
examplars in a single age — Louis Napoleon and Brig- 
ham Young. I do not think the grandson of the 
Creole a match for the Ontario County ploughboy. 
Brigham Young is a religious fanatic; Napoleon has 
no enthusiasm of any sort ; but I believe that the 
fanatic has the cooler business head. He would never 
have sent an expedition to Mexico. He may commit 
crimes, but he does not " do what is worse, make 
blunders." 

After leaving Green River, we continued our way 
across a country of the same sterile aspect as that 
described the day before. The occurrence of exten- 
sive level tracts, covered with water-worn pebbles, 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 287 

still testified to the former existence of much larger 
bodies of water that are now compressed into the nu- 
merous but narrow tributaries of the Green. The 
temperature was truly delightful, standing not far 
from 70° F. all day long, with a light breeze from the 
northwest which we found very pleasant, except in 
the vicinity of sand dunes, where its addition of pow- 
der to our toilet could have been spared. We saw 
numerous sage-fowl during the day, as tame as barn- 
yard turkeys; but having secured all the specimens 
we needed, and having no idea of adding them to our 
larder, had no motive for shooting them. I deeply 
regret the impossibility of having taken a nmnber 
of them alive to the States with me on my return. 
They would make a most valuable addition to our 
poultry yards, and I can see not the slightest obsta- 
cle to their domestication. 

About four o'clock in the afternoon we suddenly 
came upon one of the grandest marvels which Nature 
has given to human admiration on this Continent. 
This is « The Church Buttes." 

I have had frequent occasion in these pages to 
refer to that remarkable class of formations which, 
though not entirely absent from the scenery of our 
Atlantic slope, exist in so few instances (as the Cats- 
kill, Franconia, and Niagara Profile Rocks) that they 
have never attracted more than passing attention ; 
while, throughout the savage interior of the Conti- 
nent, they have attained the same neglect by the op- 
posite reason of their very frequency. We go out of 
our way to lavish raptures upon the temples of Yuca- 
tan, the mausolea of Dongola, Nubia, and Petrea, the 
Sphinx, and the Cave of Elephanta, while through- 
out our own mountain fastnesses and trackless plains 



288 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

exist ruins of architecture and statuary not one whit 
behind the foreign remains of forty centuries in 
power of execution, and far vaster in respect to age 
and size. At every change of position as we came 
through the sandstone canon to the Green River this 
same morning, the giant buttresses of red sandstone 
at one side showed some new sculpture which lacked 
nothing to compete with the half-reliefs of the kings 
whose slumber was broken by Layard, or the front- 
faced colossi carved on the African ruins. Strong, 
stern, characteristic faces were there ; no feature was 
missing ; no imagination was needed to eke out their 
details. Rather was there needed an imagination of 
the means by which nature mimicked art after such 
faithful fashion, or indeed, at first glance, of the pos- 
sibility that it could be unassisted nature at all. 

The Church Buttes surpass all natural feats of this 
order which I have ever seen in my life, even that 
wonderful succession of palaces, temples, and ceme- 
tries between Monument Creek and the foot of Pike's 
Peak. I have often been asked why they had never 
been spoken of in such extravagant terms before I 
wrote of them. The reasons are : because the hardy 
pioneers who live among the wonders of this Conti- 
nent get hardened to them by familiarity ; because, 
even if they remained impressible, they have too 
much stern matter of fact in their existence (and for 
a generation to come will have) to give them time for 
the cultivation of the aesthetic ; because this class 
does not, as a usual thing, correspond with magazines 
and journals; because the trail which runs by Church 
Buttes is not the one followed by the vast majority 
of travellers ; and because most of those who do pass 
them are night-and-day men, who spend most of their 
time in sleeping between the Missouri and Washoe. 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 289 

Twenty-one miles east of Fort Bridger, a line of 
sand and sandstone bluffs which for the last hour had 
been seen skirting our southern horizon at the dis- 
tance of a league, suddenly curved toward us, send- 
ing out in a nearly due-north direction a narrow spur, 
at whose extremity, and abutting upon our track, rose 
the mighty mass of which, with a foregoing sense of in- 
adequacy, I must now try to convey some idea. The 
impression produced by the Church Buttes upon one 
standing about fifty yards from their faQade (the best 
distance for attaining the perfect harmony of their 
effect) is that of a stupendous cathedral or basilica, 
admirable for the breadth and dignity of its design, 
and the absolute symmetry of its proportions, built 
after a new style of architecture, as justly deserving 
a place among the most strongly individualized or- 
ders of the art and science as the pure Greek of the 
Parthenon or the Gothic of Salisbury Cathedral. Al- 
most simultaneously we exclaimed, " that all our 
American architects could see this marvelous model ! " 
for we irresistibly felt that here were the suggestions 
for an order as fresh and original as comported with 
the virgin fields and forests, life and energy, spirit 
and material of the New World. Were I an architect, 
I should to-morrow be on my way to spend a year, 
if need be, in the study of the Church Buttes ; not 
coming away till I had made myself master of every 
line in the structure, and arrived at the method of 
repeating it in accordance with the limitations of 
stone and mortar and the principles conditioning hab- 
itable structure. The first temple of art, science, or 
religion which I constructed upon this plan in New 
York would be that city's greatest ornament, and the 
guarantee of my immortality on the roll of the civinzed 

19 



290 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

world's artistic benefactors. If this assertion seem 
vainglorious, let it be remembered that it is also hypo- 
thetical ; for in the great temple, at whose holiest holy 
minister Vaux, and Mould, and Wight, and Gambrill, I 
worship in the Gentiles' court, — loving the art dearly, 
but afar; also that were I an architect, and successful 
as my hypotheses, the praise would belong not to me, 
but to the nature I had humbly studied. With these 
explanations I shall be granted the mere amateur's 
license to commit purely technical blunders, and make 
an occasional misuse of names. 

The ground-plan of the Church Buttes Cathedral 
deviates in a slight degree from the circular contour, 
being a quatre-foil whose four component curves dif- 
fer very little in their elements, but meet each other 
at internal angles sufficiently acute to give an im- 
pression of the cruciform outline proper to Christian 
architecture. The nave and transept find their places 
here, though the curved have been substituted for 
the right-lined exterior. 

Upon this base-line the body of the Cathedral rises 
to a height of about three hundred feet. (I give the 
dimensions approximately, for the reason that the 
half-hour conceded to our halt was necessarily con- 
sumed, as indeed a hundred times that period might 
have been, in familiarizing ourselves with the artistic 
proportions and scientific composition of the magnifi- 
cent mass. A few hasty sketches, or memoranda of 
its impression on us at different elevations, were all 
that we had time for, anything like an accurate trig- 
onometrical observation being quite out of the ques- 
tion. I have taken care that my estimates under- 
state the facts where they err at all.) The body of 
the structure consists of a perpendicular wall follow- 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 291 

ing (in cross sections) the curves of the base-line, 
braced at intervals of astonishing equality by massive 
buttresses of the same altitude as itself At the 
proper distance for a comprehensive view, these hut- 
tresses apparently differ from each other in size and 
shape scarcely more than if they had been erected 
upon one single and uniform plan. The space be- 
tween the buttresses further carries out the minute 
resemblance to the planned offspring of a human in- 
tellect, by exhibiting in several places the appearance 
of deep, arched recesses, which it needs but little 
imagination to regard as windows or niches for the 
reception of statuary. I hardly dare to add the 
assertion that in several of these niches the statues 
for which they seem the intended receptacles actually 
exist, and are by no means the least startling elements 
in a mimicry which descends to the minutest details 
of its working pattern. Had not my travelling com- 
panions (some of whom never in their lives rode a 
fantasy without curb and snaffle) noticed these 
images, and called my attention to their striking en- 
hancement of the vraisemhlance of the structure, — this, 
too, long before I could make up my mind to speak 
of them at the risk of having my lively imagination 
cast in my teeth, — I should hesitate to refer to them 
in these pages, lest the incredulous reader, whose pros- 
ecution of acquaintance with mouldy European ruins 
has denied him the time to visit nature's immortal 
temples in the heart of his own Continent, should say, 
" Well ! this is going a little too far." Let me hasten 
to save my credit by recording one break in the con- 
tinuity of the imitation. The figures, which at the 
proper focal distance for a harmonious view of the 
tout-ensemble appear absolutely statuesque, are in no 



292 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

case entirely detached from the wall, but, on close 
approach, are perceived to be irregular knobs and 
projections from its surface. Fortunately for the 
Church Buttes ! If they could be moved, some Amer- 
ican Turk would have long ago split them in pieces 
to make commemorative paper-weights when he re- 
turned from his journey ; some Lord Elgin or Barnum 
would have long ere this had them labeled on the 
shelves of his museum. As a further concession to 
incredulity, let me add that although their statue-like 
appearance at the proper point of view is most won- 
derful. Nature does not tax our astonishment by the 
still more elaborate consistency of making them re- 
ligious in their sentiment like the temple which they 
adorn. She acts as if her mighty effort of architec- 
ture (as happens so sadly often in other fields worked 
by genius) had toppled down her reason just as she 
came to the final adornment of her nobly realized 
conception. Her overstrained intellect became un- 
geared just as she grasped the chisel which was to 
people her niches with patriarchs and saints, prophets, 
apostles, martyrs, cherubim, and grown-up angels. 

To return to the architectural part of the subject. 
The superstructure resting on the buttresses consisted 
of two domes, one superimposed upon the other ; the 
upper inclosing the crown of the lower, and descend- 
ing over it to the extent of about one third its height. 
Each of these domes was surrounded by a series of 
hutments proportioned to their size, and seeming the 
diminished continuations of those about the body of 
the edifice below. The school of architects which 
makes truth rather than beauty the guide of the 
builder, and introduces conscience into the arena of 
art, will cavil at the proposal to imitate any such ar- 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 293 

rangement, on the ground that these buttresses could 
have no necessary office in sustaining the domes, and 
are therefore false. I am not going to introduce any 
discussion of this subject into these pages. They are 
too limited to hold one of the widest quarrels of mod- 
ern times. I can only say that the effect of breaking 
up the domes by these obviously unnecessary buttress- 
like projections was very beautiful. Together the 
domes were somewhat higher than the lower structure, 
and made a total altitude of about seven hundred feet. 

I have been thus minute, because in no other way 
could I convey to my readers the effect produced by 
this wonderful structure. It is not intended, I hardly 
need say, to convey the impression that a man with 
a microscope would discover the absolute mathemat- 
ical lines of a structure such as I have described, 
should he attempt to verif)^ me by passing his face 
over the entire surface of the Church Buttes. What 
I assert is that at the distance of from fifty to a hun- 
dred yards, the effect of such a structure is produced, 
with very little assistance from imagination. 

Coming upon the formation in the wild heart of 
the Continent, no human society near you save no- 
mads like yourself, j^our irresistible feeling (if any 
feeling you have for either nature or art) must be 
one of silent, awe-struck wonder. The imitation of 
man's work by nature always arouses such a feeling. 
Before reaching here, you will have felt it, roving the 
green bottoms of the Republican, and suddenly com- 
ing upon lovely parks whose floor of fresh turf seem 
newly dismissed from the lawn-shears of the gardener ; 
whose stately elms, pecans, and cotton-woods were 
disposed in such graceful groups and leaf-arched av- 
enues that but for their age Downing himself might 



294 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

have set them ; whose well defined paths, entirely 
free from undergrowth, so symmetrical and so con- 
venient in their direction and arrangement, you can 
hardly credit to the water-seeking elk and buffalo. 
At every step of your way among the Colorado foot- 
hills, the same feeling will be awakened in you by 
natural ruins, statues, castles, temples, monuments ; 
it will follow you through the grim defiles and up the 
snow-crowned ridges of the Rocky Mountain system, 
excited by the ruins of Titanic cities scattered over 
areas of many grassless, soilless leagues. It never 
lost its freshness with me ; it was always a source of 
child-like terror and delight; to this day I cannot 
analyze it, unless on the principle of its affording a 
certain momentary argument for the supernatural, 
which, ere you can recover your cold literalism and 
modernity, your logical balance, and your grasp of phil- 
osophical explorations, sets you back in your child- 
hood's or your ancestors' marvel-world — shows you 
how the baby feels, how the ancients felt. It is as 
if the kobold, the elf, the cyclops, and the afrite had 
suddenly confronted you, barring the way through 
some awful fastness of a scarcely trodden world, and, 
catching you all alone there in the gloom, said to 
you,— 

'' You have abjured us ; you laugh at us ; you deny 
us. Look at our proofs : there are the sculptures we 
carved, the cities we built ! " 

About nightfall we reached Fort Bridger. This, 
like every military post in the mountains, is a plain 
stockade work, incapable of resisting civilized siege, 
but quite sufiicient for the protection of its inmates 
against any force which could be brought against it 
by its only enemies, the Indians. The inclosure con- 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 295 

tains several barrack-buildings and a depot for gov- 
ernment supplies as well as a large store furnishing 
all the necessary equipments for a settler's outfit. 
We found the fort garrisoned by detachments from 
several Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado regiments, 
whose officers extended very cordial invitations to our 
party to lie over for a few days, enjoy the fine hunt- 
ing and scenery in the neighborhood, and become 
better acquainted with a mess whose courtesy gave 
us assurance of a very agreeable time, had we not 
felt it necessary to reach California as soon as pos- 
sible. 

Here, too, we found one of the most noted of Over- 
land characters, Slade, formerly one of the road- 
agents of the line we were now travelling, on his 
way to Virginia City in Idaho. I had an interest- 
ing talk wdth him, and asked him for an account of 
his celebrated fights with Old Jule, as well as the ter- 
rible vengeance which he wreaked upon him. Our 
time being limited, of his own accord he promised 
to write me what I asked, and forward it to me for 
use in this or any future work I might write, intro- 
ducing characters or scenes from the Plains and the 
Mountains. Without any appearance of self-con- 
ceit, he still seemed pleased when I told him what 
was very true, — that his adventures in the wilds 
would afford materials for an intensely interesting 
romance of adventure. Poor fellow ! The next time 
I heard of him was in conversation with an Idaho 
man who had been present at his death. During the 
reign of terror, which is one of the invariable stages 
of a new mining settlement, and may be called its 
"teething" period, Slade was an efficient member of 
the Virginia City vigilance committee, and took part 



296 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

in the execution of many terrible desperadoes. But 
bloody revolutions, like France's earliest and typical 
one, generally " return to plague the inventor ; " and 
Slade, becoming a terror to his compeers, was in April, 
1864, himself put to death without even being granted 
the privilege of a parting farewell to his wife. When 
the news reached her, she had no tears to shed, but 
" spotted " the members of the committee, and reg- 
istered a fearful oath, that before she died her hus- 
band should be avenged on them to the full. I should 
hate to be one of that committee ; for not only is 
Mrs. Slade one of the finest pistol-shots in the West 
(without any allowance for her sex), but a woman of 
long memory, and in reckless courage the perfect 
match and compeer of her late husband. She is a 
magnificent woman in appearance, and I thought 
Slade himself a model of manly beauty. 

Much as we regretted missing an Indian powwow 
that was to have taken place the day after, and 
would have supplied much valuable genre material 
to pencil and pen, we bade good-by to our kind 
would-be entertainers, with a promise to stop with 
them if we returned from California overland. 

Black's Fork of the Green River is a small stream 
affording good water privileges to the Fort, and puz- 
zles the traveller by running north from the spot 
where he now crosses it, until his map shows him 
its remarkable sinuosity. Having crossed this and 
Muddy Fork, about twelve miles further on, he is out 
of the Green River basin, and almost immediately en- 
ters a tract tributary to that of the Great Salt Lake. 
A series of tremendously heavy grades lead him into 
the Wahsatch, the last and westernmost range of the 
Rocky Mountains. 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 297 

Immediately about Fort Bridger a small surface had 
been put under cultivation for the partial supply of 
residents at the Post, and in some directions ever- 
green wood was plenty ; but on entering the Wah- 
satch, we again came into a region of gray round hills 
having no vegetation but the artemisia and grease 
wood. The night was a magnificent one. The full 
moon was in a cloudless sky ; the air was perfectly 
still, and although abundantly cold, to show us that 
we were still at a mountamous altitude, not to com- 
pare in this respect with that of the ridges we had 
hitherto passed at night. I had by this time acquired 
the habit of going without sleep (one much easier 
than that of sleeping bent into an ampersand); so I 
abandoned the inside to companions accomplished in 
that performance, and, having lost at some stage- 
changing station the guy-rope apparatus by which I 
had lashed myself to the wagon-top in former times 
of miserable sleepiness, at once selected the one prac- 
ticable method of entertaining myself, and got into 
conversation with the driver. The only scenery was 
that congeries of ashen-hued hills I have mentioned, 
whose formation could be accounted for by a lively 
imagination on the hypothesis that when this part 
of the world was in a liquid, or, more strictly, in a 
lathery condition, some Titan school-boy had put his 
pipe-bowl into the basin, and blown the contents up 
into a mass of contiguous bubbles. If these bubbles 
had been iridescent like those of our childhood, the 
reflection of that gorgeous full moon on them to-night 
would have been worth seeing ; but their gray mono- 
tone and constantly repeated figure made this land- 
scape the drowsiest on our journey. 

The sun was well up when we reached Bear Kiver 



298 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

(the first of the Salt Lake tributaries), striking it about 
thirty miles north of its head, where it is a substan- 
tial stream of forty or fifty yards in breadth, with less 
than the average rapidity of mountain currents, of a 
somewhat muddy tinge, and cradled by the same 
round hills of gray sage as those which we had been 
threading all night. Here we took breakfast. I long 
ago concluded not to bore my readers with gastro- 
nomic comments, unless the subject deserved animad- 
version by unusual excellence or absolute atrocity. 
The Bear River breakfast does not belong to the first 
class of subjects ; a recent good dinner has made me 
magnanimous toward the errors of my race, so I spare 
Bear River. 

We were now ninety-two miles from Salt Lake City. 
Bear River, at this point, lies in the trough between 
the first and second ridges of the Wahsatch Range. 
Immediately after crossing the river by a substantial 
wooden bridge, we began to ascend a bald mountain, 
which rose, as I estimated, from twelve to fifteen 
hundred feet above the bed of the stream, and which 
compelled us, for the horses' sake, to dismount and 
wajk. I must not omit to say that our load had been 
increased at Bear River by three soldiers of a Cali- 
fornia regiment stationed at Salt Lake City. These 
constituted part of the detail for Overland Mail pro- 
tection, furnished by General Connor, commandant at 
the Mormon city, and afterwards, as he well deserved, 
and as an instance of unusual government perspicuity, 
at the head of the expedition sent out for a final end- 
ing of all our Indian troubles. Our gallant preservers 
were a noble set of men, but (I say it neither in sor- 
row nor in anger) they took up room. We knew that 
although the present area of greatest peril to our 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 299 

scalps lay on the other side of Salt Lake City, extend- 
ing over a little less than three hundred miles of des- 
ert, there had been, at various times, terrible massacres 
on this side of the Wahsatch also ; yet our intellects, 
prevented by long cramping and distortion of their 
fleshly receptacle, lacked the equanimity for a just 
striking of the balance between death by scalping 
and the same disaster more slowly effected by squeez- 
ing. I fear we were not grateful. I know that I my- 
self wished the detail belonged to the Cavalry arm of 
our service. But the brave fellows were very patient 
with us, and sat as nearly sideways as could be ex- 
pected of the class whose prime aphorism is " Eyes 
front ! " 

In a state of semi-somnambulism we all got out, and 
effected the ascent of the first grade from Bear River 
on foot. Even the sleepiest of us was rewarded when 
he reached the top, and stood still to wait for the 
panting beasts we had distanced, and was obliged in 
candor to own that the view from this height to the 
opposite ridge and along the slender creeping line of 
the Bear was abundantly worth the fatigue of walk- 
ing to obtain it. 

About noon we entered that famous gallery of the 
"Wahsatch, the first of an intercommunicating series 
which lead by easy grades entirely through the range 
and down to Salt Lake City — Echo Canon. The series 
is one of the most magnificent avenues by which Na- 
ture has ever supplemented human art or challenged 
it to hopeless contest. To wring from Nature such an 
avenue and right of way between two tracts divided 
in their physical geography by a heaven-high barrier 
a hundred miles thick, would have cost man at least 
a century of the most enlightened skill and the most 



300 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

industrious labor. Therefore, as if she felt sympathy 
with those social and commercial currents which seek 
to mingle grandly over the whole world, she gives 
man the pass of the Wahsatch, free as air. 

The Echo Canon is a cleft through the range, about 
ten miles long and of varying width, sometimes open- 
ing laterally into valleys or recesses a mile broad, 
often contracting to a mere alley-way of twenty or 
thirty yards across. It has a main southwesterly 
trend, and at its bottom runs the little creek named 
after it, a small mountain rivulet fed partly by springs 
and partly by such slender tricklings as reach it from 
the distant snows. The walls of the canon are every- 
where precipitous, and in the narrowest defiles quite 
perpendicular, frequently rising to a height of ten or 
twelve hundred feet. These are mostly of a brilhant 
red sandstone, and their effect on a sunshiny day is 
like that of masses of carbuncle. 

Echo Canon must obviously have received its name 
from an echo, though neither by experiment nor ask- 
ing could I discover one sufficiently remarkable to 
have given its name to such a magnificent work of 
Nature. Its grandeur fortunately makes it of no im- 
portance whether this subsidiary clap- trap be well 
based or not. Another source of its reputation exists 
in Brigham's preparation to fortify it, several years 
ago, when, to appease a sudden access of anti-Mor- 
monism at the East, Government (or rumor for it) 
proposed to send an expedition against Salt Lake 
City, and break up the entire Mormon settlement. 
Fortunately that act of folly was not committed, al- 
though a still worse one was. The Mormons were 
not attacked, but a body of United States troops 
were subsisted at enormous expense at Camp Floyd 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 301 

(well named after a thief and spendthrift of the peo- 
ple's money), a place thirty-nine miles from the Mor- 
mon city, and having no single advantage as a strate- 
gic or commercial post, except its possession of a well 
not too brackish to drink of. These unfortunate 
troops were called an army of observation, probably 
because they must have built an observatory, and 
used a telescope, to see any Mormons at all. The 
distance was not, however, too great for the inter- 
change of courtesies on the part of the chief men of 
either side, nor for the daily visit of enterprising 
commercial saints with something to sell. General 
Johnson, in accordance with the orders of the venera- 
ble imbecile at the head of affairs, acted as the leader 
of a nice, well-behaved little army should, and never 
gave the saints any oifense. To revive a joke in- 
vented for the benefit of another military quietist : 
It seems a shame to attack him ; he never attacked 
anybody. So he stayed there, until from being an 
eye-sore to the more irritable Mormons, he became a 
laughing-stock to all of them. He is a good joke 
among them to this day. The crows laugh at a scare- 
crow they have detected ; how much heartier would 
they laugh if they could sell him his own grain at 
one hundred per cent, over the market, or, to stretch 
the metaphor, his own beeves at the same rate ! 

The narrow defile which Brigham selected to fortify 
before he knew his invaders, is a very Thermopylae. 
Its bare red walls rise to a height of fifteen hundred 
feet in a sheer perpendicular. An army of the size 
of Johnson's could have been decoyed into this de- 
file (its narrowest part is no wider than Broadway at 
Union Square), and there put to death at the pleasure 
of their foes. Brigham's idea was to shower them 



302 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

with grape and shrapnel from declined guns hung 
over the edge of the precipice, and sweep them with 
similar missiles from each end of the defile ; but an 
ambuscade of sharp-shooters at the top of the preci- 
pice, and a body of men with crow-bars to topple 
down loose fragments of the crag on the invaders' 
heads, would have been all sufficient for the bloody 
work. 

Early in the afternoon we reached another small 
affluent of the Great Salt Lake known as Weber 
River, and thenceforward our course lay through a 
region very different from any we had been travelling 
since we left Denver, indeed, since we left the Mis- 
souri itself 

We had entered the area of Mormon conquests. 
Thus far this strange people had crowded back 
against the mountains, desolation, sterility, and pov- 
erty. With a delight no words can paint, no heart 
can feel save that of a traveller who for a thousand 
miles has seen the earth beneath his feet an almost 
unbroken ashen gray, or burnt brown, did we look 
out upon a boundless scope of living green — green 
grass, green grain-fields, green gardens — cool, fresh, 
and tender as New England meadow-land in June. 
The great sleek oxen and the mild-eyed cows were 
browsing lazily, up to their bellies in verdure. The 
rye and wheat were so packed by their luxuriance, 
that to us, looking down on them from a crag of the 
defile, their tops seemed almost like a solid turf, but 
for the faint wind that sent waves of shadow over 
them, chasing waves of light. Five minutes had suf- 
ficed to bring about the greatest visual contrast of 
our lives. Sterility, savage gloom, death, or the even 
deeper death of never having yet been born, — these 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 303 

were the burden of Nature's chant among the crags 
not a mile behind us ; now she reveled like a Bac- 
chante singing the joys of corn, and wine, and oil, or 
better yet, crowned with plumes of harvest, came as 
the matronly Ceres, leading by her little berry-stained 
fingers the young Pomona, with prophetic orchard 
blossoms wreathed about her sunny hair, both singing 
with the stately bard of old, " The wilderness and the 
solitary place shall be glad for them ; and the desert 
shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." 

The beneficent cause of all this luxuriance was as 
silent about itself as divine charity. But we knew, 
here and there we could see, the canals with their 
innumerable smaller channels of irrigation which ram- 
ified over the whole field, hiding their bounty under 
the stalwart stalks, and juicy blades, and plump ripen- 
ing ears whose roots they nourished. To the unstud- 
ied observer, him to whom all sand is the same, the 
witness of his eyes seems incredible. The soil of that 
wonderful harvest field must be like this which blows 
in our faces from the shifting dunes at our side ; yet 
this is sand. True, but it is also one of the richest 
soils in the world ; for it is the detritus of rocks which, 
without exaggeration, the scientific man might choose 
to call baked fertilisers. We have made our soup, our 
stove-polish, even our fuel, into blocks; so we may 
have blocks of condensed soil. Piled up into crags 
till we want them, they make excellent scenery ; the 
weather grinds them down, and spreads them over our 
grain fields and kitchen gardens ; by and by they are 
as good dinner as they were scenery. There is no 
had soil in the world. There are incomplete soils, — 
soils that say, " I'll advance all the silex you want, all 
the hme, or all the potash, only you must get the 



304 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

aluminum." But Utah soil need hardly be defended 
in this category. As yet it needs no manure, scarcely 
any top-dressing, unless as a mulch to guard against 
excessive evaporation. All it needs is water, and how 
to get that is the plain problem which engages the 
Mormon farmer day and night ; not so complicated 
a problem as presents itself to many a New England 
agriculturist, but making up for its slight draft on 
skill by a tremendous call on industry. The Utah 
farmer must woo the very snow-peaks, and through 
them the clear, unanswering heavens, which smile on 
his starvation, until he makes the mountain-top his 
mediator, and builds a channel from the edge of the 
eternal ice to his own acres, that the bounty of the 
sky may not pay too large a commission to his sub- 
lime go-between by leakage on the way. None but 
the Mormon himself can tell you what miles of 
patiently constructed troughing, and piping, and 
ditching are expressed in those glorious green acres 
which, like the finest things in a picture, seem the 
easiest done because the artist spent his sweat, and 
blood, and very soul in giving them the look which 
hides his great struggles forever. 

It was nearly sundown when we stopped to change 
horses at Kimball's, twenty-nine miles from Salt Lake 
City, and the last station but one between us and the 
capital of the Saints. Hitherto during the afternoon 
I had found the beauty of the world's newly re- 
covered green somewhat marred by the absence of 
the highest element in life's comfort, and the dearest 
stimulus to, as well as resting-place from, life's in- 
dustries. I looked for it steadily, yet found it never. 
The chickens had coops; the stock had its corrals, and 
stables, and pens ; the very grass and grain were com- 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 305 

ing in at last from the heat and burden of their day, 
to rest and shelter in substantial barns. But for them 
who toiled that these might thrive, for whom these 
lived, and moved, and had their being, — the men, the 
women, and the children, — what had they to come to ? 
I looked about me over the green fields, carefully, 
wonderingly, everywhere, and found houses in plenty, 
but no home. 

Not that the material was lacking. Some of the 
houses were excellent snug specimens of the adobe ; 
others were neat structures of wood ; scarcely any 
gave outward sign of poverty, shiffclessness, or un- 
neatness in their occupants. The dejection which 
they produced in me, their utter un-homelikeness, 
proceeded almost wholly from negative causes. They 
looked like mere sleeping and eating places. The 
spirit which raises the human habitation above the 
grade of the marmot's burrow, the fox's cover, or the 
bear's den — the spirit without which a palace is no 
better than these — was utterly absent, — not gone, 
for it never had been. 

When the quantity of houses within the same in- 
closure increased, the quality decreased proportion- 
ally. I saw little red-headed, tow-headed, black-haired 
children tumbling together in promiscuous heaps, 
rolling on the unsodded ground of the same door- 
yard, while a couple of women were sitting listlessly 
on different porches, watching their play, calling to 
them in shrill accents, yet seeming to ignore each 
other entirely. No house had its pretty little garden- 
patch in front of it. No flower-beds testified to the 
pride which wifely hands took in making the house, 
whither a lover brought them home, the delightful 
and longed-for nest which means earthly heaven to 

20 



306 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the matured husband. There was no indication any- 
where of keeping the marriage wine, yielded by the 
clusters of maidenhood, from turning into the vinegar 
of that wretched self-deception, " the steady old mar- 
ried people's" condition. No climbing rose stretched 
its arms over the gable to fling bouquets and perfumed 
dew into the second-story window. Around the porch- 
pillars, where such there were, nestled no honey- 
suckle, no columbine, no Wisteria, nor cypress, nor 
morning glory, nor madeira, nor trumpet vine. What 
unvarying betrayal of the house's inside is always 
given, clear as speech, by these lovely dumb outr 
siders ! While you listen and assent to them, there 
she stands, turning their tendrils about her finger, 
with as delicate lovingness as if they were her own 
soft curls, and she standing before a toilet whose 
true tale makes her modesty blush with joy because 
it is almost tea-time, and he is coming. There is no 
need she should be here with her tender little prun- 
ings, her dexterous persuasions of the wayward shoot, 
her fond help of the right twisting one; for the caress 
she gave her pets yesterday is still gratefully remem- 
bered by them, and they tell of her in ways unmis- 
takable. The very bees, for whom she has made an 
emerald spiral stair up to a seventh heaven of bless- 
edness among the nectaries, croon about her as they 
drink honey from goblets of alabaster, and gold, and 
ruby, and empurpled crystal, • saying, "There's a 
woman within! there's a woman within!" Yes, in- 
deed ! who else ? The husband puts his name on a 
silvered copper-plate — great, gross, mechanical, pur- 
chasable thing, which you might melt down to make 
pennies, or stair-rods, or andirons; the wife writes 
hers in God's live letters that grow, not get shaved 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 307 

and jointed into sentences, on the lattice of a shady 
veranda. And when she is gone, — look at the vines 
and the flower-beds, — then there is no need of crape 
on the door-knob. As they wilt, the bees come again: 
"There's no woman within — no woman — no woman 
within any more." 

The nearest approach to the New England stand- 
ard which I saw in Utah, was Kimball's, the next star 
tion but one, as I have said, to Salt Lake City. The 
driver promised to be as long as possible in changing 
horses, that I might seek admission to the house — a 
cozy white cottage, low, broad, and roomy, with those 
architectural after-thoughts, known as wings and lean- 
tos, which mark the increase of family and prosperity 
as the growth of a tree has its memorandum in the 
rings of its bark. This admission I sought, not from 
any desire to take Time by the forelock in my explora- 
tion of the Mormon's domestic concerns, but because 
the house looked like one where I could get bread 
and milk. Its outside had a promise of scoured white- 
oak shelves within ; of dazzling pans, golden cream, 
and snowy loaves. 

My knock at the door was answered with an imme- 
diate " Come in ! " I found myself in a sunny, low- 
ceiled sitting-room, where a fine-looking matron, 
somewhere in her well-preserved fifties, sat talking to 
a pair of very tidy and prepossessing young women, 
both under twenty-five, and each holding a healthy 
baby. 

I frankly stated my case at once. I was an Over- 
land traveller who had lived on cured provisions and 
hard-tack so long that a slice of fresh bread and but- 
ter, with a bowl of sweet "morning's milk," unde- 
nuded of the cream, would not only insure my grat- 



308 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

itude, but the regular market price, left to their own 
quotation. 

The matronly lady instantly arose and went to the 
dairy closet. The material for my satisfaction was 
before me in a few seconds, with the snowiest of dam- 
ask towels beneath it. I felt new life with every bite 
and table-spoonful. I felt the dust washed out of me, 
body and soul. A still further freshening occurred to 
me as I looked at these pretty young mothers and 
their babies. I made up a pretty little idyl about 
them. The mothers were former school acquaint- 
ances — cousins — something of that sort. They had 
been married about the same time ; by a pleasant 
turn of Fortune's wheel they had been brought to be 
near neighbors in the same settlement ; and now, as I 
had seen at the East so often, one of the pretty young 
mothers had run in to match babies with the other, 
and prattle out their hearts' sweet foolishness with- 
out risk of being misunderstood — talking lovely rig- 
maroles of baby-talk to their ^^ittle pessiis tittens,'' 
with fullest sympathy from each other and benignant 
grandma. 

The sight of them, after six hundred miles of ster- 
ile ice and stone, exhilarated me like a generous ladle- 
ful of punch. " Those are very pretty babies ! " said 
I, addressing the matron in all sincerity of heart. 

" Yes, I think so," she replied ; " but you must 
allow for a grandmother's partiality." 

I replied that no such allowance was necessary to 
me, and continued, "These young ladies are your 
daughters, then ? " 

" They are my daughters-in-law, sir," returned the 
fine -looking matron. 

" So you have both your sons and their wives with 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 309 

you ? Indeed, you are to be envied, with such a de- 
lightful home about you in other respects." 

" These babies, sir," answered the matron gravely, 
"are the children of my son, now abroad on the 
Lord's business — my so7i, Mr. Kimball, after whom 
this place is called. These young ladies are his wives, 
and I am the first wife of one you have often ere this 
heard of in the States, — Heber Kimball, second Presi- 
dent, and next to our prophet Brigham Young in the 
government of Utah." 

Why should I blush ? Nobody else did. The ba- 
bies crowed as they were tossed ceiling-ward in the 
maternal fashion, not even paying the Gentile in- 
truder the compliment of getting scared by him. 
The young mothers had heard the whole conversa- 
tion; yet Eve before the fall could not have been 
more innocent of shame. Mrs. Heber Kimball showed 
no sign of knowing that I could be surprised by any- 
thing she told me. Yet I, a cosmopolitan, a man of 
the world, liberal to other people's habits and opin- 
ions to a degree which had often subjected me to 
censure among strictarians in the Eastern States, 
blushed to my very temples, and had to retire into 
the privacy of my tipped milk-bowl to screen the 
struggle by which I restored my moral equipoise. • I 
was beyond measure provoked at myself Ever since 
we left Green River I had known I was in Utah. I 
had been thinking about Mormon peculiarities all day 
long; yet the first apparition to my senses of that 
which had absorbed my intellect, took me entirely 
aback ! 

If the three observed my confusion, they had suffi- 
cient tact not to show it. I think that Mrs. Heber 
Kimball the first must undoubtedly have understood 



310 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

my position, and that the plain straightforward 
statement which she made, was for the purpose of 
landing me at on-e throw in the midst of polygamic 
ideas. She did not ask my name ; made no inquiries 
regarding my companions, who were stretching their 
legs outside of the cottage gate, rejecting all invita- 
tions on my part to come in and share my bread and 
milk with me. She was kind and pleasantly inter- 
ested in my well-being to the extent of this provision, 
but as nonchalant of whatever spirit I might cherish 
toward Utah as one can well imagine. Without the 
least braggadocio or offensive protrusion of our mu- 
tual and radical differences, she nevertheless set me 
at once upon the true basis, and let me know that 
polygamy was the law of the land where I now trod, 
and she and her own as firm in the faith as I in mo- 
nogamy, without anything more to be ashamed of in 
her creed than the Vicar of Wakefield or Horace 
Greeley in theirs. 

Had I never seen anything more of polygamy than 
I met here, I should have gone my way feeling puz- 
zled as to whether the system might not have pos- 
sessed a certain advantage for people arrived at one 
particular stage of civilization, akin to that which it 
bestowed upon the Old Testament Jews. I had no 
doubt that it would be a frightfully retrograde step 
for the society whence I came, but that decided noth- 
ing in regard to these Mormons. On the ladder of 
civilization, round number two would be degradation 
to the foot planted on number three ; but it would be 
as great an elevation to the stander on number one. 

Mrs. Heber Kimball the first, though rapidly near- 
ing her grand climacteric, was the finest-looking 
woman whom I saw in Utah. In the Highlands of 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 311 

Scotland she might have been Helen McGregor ; in 
Palmyra, Zenobia ; in France, Joan of Arc. She was 
considerably above woman's middle size ; her hair, 
slightly grizzled, was dressed neatly back beneath a 
plain, snow-white cap ; her figure was erect, and the 
embodiment of strength and endurance ; her eyes, 
which seemed a bluish gray, were fearless, and looked 
straightforward ; her mouth was almost masculine in 
its firmness ; her nose a finely cut aristocratic Roman ; 
her manner perfectly self-poised, replete with influen- 
tial and winning dignity, and expressive of a powerful 
will, strong for the control of her own faculties, as 
well as the whole nature of other people ; her voice 
pleasant, yet commanding; her general expression 
that of pride without self-consciousness, and courage 
untainted by braggadocio. She was a woman to make 
you stop and look back after her in a crowded thor- 
oughfare ; she would have arrested your attention 
anywhere, on Broadway, the Strand, or the most 
thronged portion of the Parisian Boulevards. I did 
not wonder when, days afterwards, in talking with 
her husband, who knew nothing of my previous meet- 
ing with her, — since she was only visiting her daugh- 
ters-in-law at the time I saw her, — Heber Kimball 
told me that not only in time, but in ability, she was 
the very first of his wives — the wife to whom he 
most deferred, and in whose wisdom he had the most 
implicit confidence. I was fully prepared for that as- 
sertion ; but I confess that my credulity was at first 
nearly staggered, when I heard that her conversion 
to Mormonismwas prior to her husband's, and that, in 
plain terms, he was her convert to all the tenets of Joe 
Smith and the later dogma of polygamy — last of all 
conceivable doctrines for whose championship you 



312 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

would think of looking to a wife ! Paradoxical as 
this assertion may be, I have repeatedly heard it 
made among Mormons, yet never with the faintest 
hint at a denial. Indeed, the style of her few short 
sentences addressed to me seemed to show that she 
gloried in it. 

After my recovery behind the charitable shelter of 
the milk-bowl, I could not succeed in disciplining my 
mind as thoroughly as I had my face. That poor 
monogamic brain of mine kept pondering and dream- 
ing as if it were dazed. How could those pretty 
young women sit and look at each other's babies — 
both of nearly the same age ; hear the matron talk 
of the youthful apostle to the Gentiles now gathering 
in the elect from foreign parts ; see, each in the op- 
posite infant, the plain apostolic seal stamped on its 
little countenance, — yet rock away so cheerfully and 
talk baby Latin so blithely ; be-sister each other, and 
give mutual advice about the cut of long clothes, 
or the management of teething ? Heavens ! What 
strange unsexing operation must their souls have 
gone through to keep them from frenzy — murder — 
suicide ? I afterward put this question to their father- 
in-law, Heber the first, and his terse, all-conclusive 
explanation was, "Triumph o' grace." 

I know that conscience is mostly custom, that taste 
is training, and shame the sense of being singular. 
Still I confess that my imagination's utmost stretch 
falls short of realizing how that double pair, baby 
and mother, can sit vis-a-vis all day long, and not feel 
hate, horror, hell itself striving somewhere in their 
depths ! I ache as I look at them ; for it seems as 
if those breasts which suckle the babies, must suffer 
such frightful tension as sometimes, instead of whole- 
some human milk, to yield gall and blood ! 



THE APPROACH TO SALT LAKE CITY. 313 

I should have felt reheved if those two pretty young 
girls of a sudden had leaped up and fired their babies 
at each other's heads, pounced upon each other with 
a tigrine spring, seamed each other's faces with re- 
lentless nails, tore hair, gouged eyes, bit, maimed, 
killed ! Then would they have shown decidedly less 
grace, but considerably more humanity. The saints 
would have evaporated, but in their places would be 
women. 

I meant to say just what I have written ; so I felt 
glad that these charming, kindly, self- crucifying crea- 
tures offered not the slightest objection to my paying 
a quarter for my bowl of milk and buttered slice. I 
never belonged to that class who believe a good din- 
ner equivalent to a contract to lie for the flattery of 
one's host. Truth always, on my time-table, has the 
right of way over turbot. 

After leaving Kimball's, we rode a distance of twen- 
ty-nine miles through a continuation of the widening 
gallery which had hitherto led us through the Wah- 
satch, stopping about midway at Mountain Dell, where 
a beautiful stream ran crystal-clear to unite its waters 
with the Salt Lake Basin, and where I had time to 
take the first invigorating plunge which I had en- 
joyed since leaving Denver. This description of the 
refreshing bath is perhaps rather too conventional 
and rhapsodic ; for my action was a much sedater one, 
and consisted in lying down and having the dust 
washed from my parched body by a flow of deliciously 
pure water, two or three feet deep above the pebbly 
bottom. 

I found the effect of the bath so sedative that I en- 
joyed, after returning to my seat, the first unbroken 
sleep I had known in several days. 



314 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

I was awakened by my companions to enjoy the 
weird picturesqueness of a fire kindled by camping' 
emigrants, and flashing its spectral light upon a fine 
perpendicular precipice of white granite, just as we 
broke through the western face of the Wahsatch, and 
came to the head of the foot-hills from which the vast 
basin of the Lake is for the first time visible, with the 
embowered City of the Saints sleeping at the bottom 
of its vast cradle. 

Under a vague mysterious moonlight we whirled of 
a sudden among the adobe houses and the shadowy 
streets of Brigham's capital. Going at once to the 
only hotel of the town, in fifteen minutes, and with 
our piles of Eastern letters unread, we were, for the 
first time in six days and nights, as soundly asleep as 
Epimenides. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE NEW JERUSALEM. 

The original sense in which I use the title to this 
chapter will be defended as I proceed. I certainly do 
not bestow the name of New Jerusalem upon the 
Mormon capital because of its bearing any resem- 
blance to the city of the disembodied saints. 

Among the many courtesies extended our party by 
Mr. Holladay and others connected with the Overland 
road was a letter from Mr. Center, commending us to 
the attention of Mr. Rumfield, representative of the 
Wells -Fargo interest at Salt Lake City. Through 
this gentleman we made the acquaintance of Mr. 
Stein, then Mr. Holladay's agent at the same place, 
and since occupying an important position as manager 
of one of that great stage-man's new lines, for which 
he is eminently fitted by a grade of business talents 
and indefatigable industry seldom met with at the 
East or West. 

These gentlemen formed the capital of acquaint- 
anceship upon which we began business in Utah. To 
them we owe innumerable and peculiar facilities for 
the study of Salt Lake City, its scenery, its people, 
and its usages, though they are responsible for none 
of my opinions. 

Tlie Salt Lake Hotel, where we stopped, is the only 
one frequented by Gentiles ; indeed, the only one which 
claims any position corresponding to the hotels at the 
East. It is a good -sized house of two stories in height, 



316 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

with broad verandas on its fa9ade. Our rooms opened 
upon the upper one, and thence we had a fine view 
of the principal street. 

The peculiarities of Mormonism are not external ; 
and a traveller merely seeing the city in transitu, must 
be disappointed of the keen, fresh sensation which 
people expect in visiting the centre of the most re- 
markable social system in Christendom. 

The hotel we found to differ in no important re- 
spect from the well kept, homely tavern of any quiet 
Eastern village. Tourists fortunate enough to have 
received their first impressions of Green Mountain 
scenery before Vermont began to be crossed by its 
net-work of iron rails, used to see a very similar tav- 
ern on their way over the magnificent stage road 
from Troy to Rutland, when they halted for dinner 
the first day out at " Love's,'^ in Bennington. Town- 
send, who keeps the Salt Lake Hotel, is a gruff but 
obliging man, between fifty and sixty. It never oc- 
curred to me that he was a Saint until Heber Kim- 
ball called him " brother ; " and the unobtrusiveness 
of polygamy at its very head-quarters may be inferred 
from the fact that a week elapsed before it occurred 
to me that the industrious old lady who gave us such 
nice little dishes of hot scrambled eggs, and made us 
fresh coffee when we came down late to breakfast was 
one Mrs. Townsend, and a younger woman who took 
such good care of our rooms was another. 

The only peculiarity of the hotel was its lack of a 
bar-room ; and with this few people obliged to make 
any protracted stay at a Western hotel will be dis- 
posed to quarrel. The deficiency was a guarantee of 
quiet nights and orderly days. From sunrise till sun- 
set the long line of tie-posts in front of Townsend's 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 317 

was studded with hardy little mustangs, whose sun- 
browned riders were refreshing themselves within, 
or transacting business without ; and until a late hour 
of the night (always till the Overland stage arrived 
from the East), the verandas were occupied by gen- 
tlemen smoking and chatting in their easy-chairs; 
but never was the seemly order of the establishment 
broken by any approach to a row, or even by vocif- 
erous discussion. 

The dining-room was lively and bustling for a 
couple of hours from the bell-ringing of each meal, 
fresh relays of guests occupying vacated seats as fast 
as one battalion of dishes could be cleared from the 
field, and a fresh one brought into position. Town- 
send was largely patronized by both ladies and gen- 
tlemen ; but neither among permanent nor transient 
guests was there anything to suggest the existence 
of peculiar social customs, had we not already been 
aware of it. 

The main street, which ran in front of the hotel, 
was splendidly broad, — in this respect not surpassed 
by the widest portion of Pennsylvania Avenue.^ Its 
architecture was nothing to boast of, being that of a 
town whose citizens are still in the first stage of do- 
ing, and have not yet reached the second one of con- 
sidering how to do. The shops were consistent with 
the hotel, and like it might have been transported 
from the principal street of any prosperous Eastern 
village. There were some brick, some wooden, and 
numerous adobe houses, generally two stories in 
height, and without decoration. The commercial 
fronts displayed their wares through no ambitious 
plates of French glass, but announced them on shin- 
gles or handbills, and by the still more straightfor- 



318 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ward method of samples at the door-way. All the 
ordinary trades were represented, but there seemed 
to be the usual country fondness for miscellaneous 
traffic within one inclosure ; the house-furnishing 
business, inclusive of groceries, shoes, hardware, all, 
indeed, that one would look for in the "country 
store " par excellence, being a favorite and well pat- 
ronized kind of commerce. The milliner and dress- 
maker had their separate sanctuaries, as one finds all 
over the civilized world, but possessed no such prom- 
inence as they might naturally be supposed to occupy 
in Utah. It was evident that polygamy and gynoc- 
racy are terms by no means convertible. The vast 
scale of shopping prevalent in Gentile communities 
is the grand guarantee and safeguard of monogamy. 
Brigham Young is undoubtedly the richest man in 
the Western Hemisphere, even richer perhaps than 
any single member of the Rothschild family ; but 
were his milliner's and mantua-maker's bills to be 
calculated on the basis of a single-wived establish- 
ment at the East, even his exchequer might be ex- 
cused for coming to bankruptcy. From my observa- 
tion of Mormon sumptuary habits, I should suppose 
that the budget of a polygamic household was made 
up on the principle of dividing one normal and East- 
ern wife's allowance among a multitude, instead of 
multiplying it by the number of the harem. The 
philosopher acquainted with the underlying motive 
of most marriages in society will find no insuperable 
difficulty in understanding how a given number of 
wives can consent to receive the fraction of a man 
apiece ; but when it comes to dividing the pin-money, 
he beholds an eternal obstacle to the spread of polyg- 
amic ideas among the higher classes of society. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 319 

I was struck by the rarity of doctors' and lawyers' 
shingles in the principal street of Salt Lake City. 
The former deficiency is easily accounted for. There 
are few more healthful localities on the Continent 
than this. In the immediate neighborhood of the 
Great Salt Lake, fogs are frequent and obstinate. The 
only escape of such a vast body of water being air- 
ward, the evaporation constantly going on beneath 
an unclouded sun necessarily keeps the atmosphere 
overladen with moisture. But the shores of the lake 
are almost as unsettled as when the Mormons first 
came to the Territory. The nearest point of the 
shore (Black Rock) is twenty miles distant from the 
city; and although the temperature of the latter must 
be to a certain extent modified by the lake fogs, dur- 
ing the summer at least, they do not manifest them- 
selves in the city as unpleasantly perceptible moist- 
ure. The outskirts of the city along the river Jordan 
are in some places overflowed and boggy; within five 
miles of it are a number of large thermal springs ; yet 
the people seem troubled by no malaria, nor by the 
endemic diseases which arise from it. 

The vital intertexture of social, religious, and civil 
polity resulting from the Mormon system, would well- 
nigh do away altogether with the profession of the 
attorney and counselor, but for the fact that the 
United States Government still claims territorial ju- 
risdiction in Utah. The Federal authority, is nom- 
inally paramount, but one fact must always operate 
to nullify it for all practical purposes. The United 
States courts may get their judges from any portion 
of the Union at our Chief Magistrate's discretion, but 
their juries must always be impaneled from among 
the Mormons themselves. The Gentile, resident in 



320 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

or travelling through Utah, gains nothing by getting 
his cause into the United States courts. Human in- 
genuity can fashion no oath comprehensive enough 
in its form or terrible enough in its sanction to bind 
a Mormon juryman to the prejudice of his coreligion- 
ist, or of the vast autocracy {theocracy he calls it) by 
whose favor he holds all that is most precious to him, 
not only for the life which now is, but for that which 
is to come. Where the matter in dispute is indiffer- 
ent to ''Hhe Church'''' or to any Mormon in it, the citizen 
of Utah is as just as another man. Under the same 
circumstances, the Gentile litigant may be sure of jus- 
tice at Brigham Young's own hands. Were I anxious 
for speedy adjustment of a cause between myself and 
any other Gentile, and confident of the justice of my 
own side, I do not know the referee in whose hands I 
would more gladly leave my interests than Brigham 
Young's. Outside the arena of his fanaticism, he is 
not surpassed in honesty of purpose, clear-headedness, 
purity of motive, and justice of feeling, by any man 
I ever met. But rare indeed must be the case in 
which " the Church " has not some little fibre of in- 
terest, some trifling stake sufficient to partialize the 
referee, in a community the boast of whose religious 
polity is that it interpenetrates every relation of life, 
and ramifies through every interest of the proprietor, 
the citizen, and the man. The result of this state of 
things is to remove the whole amenability of private 
conscience, not only from the United States tribunal 
which frames the oath, but from the Gentile's God 
whose power forms its sanction, to the Church of the 
Latter-day Saints and the incarnation of its divine au- 
thority in the apostle, prophet, autocrat, and vicar of 
the true God, Brigham Young. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 321 

So long as our Government respects Magna Charta 
privileges, and deals with Mormonism upon common- 
law principles and a peace status, so long will its 
courts in Utah remain mere scarecrows, known by 
the people to be made of rags and bean-poles. No 
order of court has the slightest validity ; no guber- 
natorial proclamation even the poor privilege of a 
right to be published and circulated, without the 
indorsement of Brigham Young. There is but one 
remedy to this condition of Federal powerlessness — 
the declaration of martial law throughout the Terri- 
tory. Military commanders stationed in Utah have 
repeatedl}^ urged this course on the "Washington Ex- 
ecutive. There has been at least one case in which I 
think the prayer must have been indorsed by the 
most rigorous theorist upon popular rights and con- 
stitutional measures. But it has never been granted. 
The past few years have greatly modified men's views 
regarding the safety and propriety of a recourse, in 
extreme exigencies, to abnormal methods. We have 
seen the rights of jury trial and habeas corpus sus- 
pended in emergencies far less imperative than sev- 
eral which have called for that action in Utah. Still, 
the reaction of feeling following our late war's neces- 
sary laxities will operate strongly against any future 
attempt at interference with the course of civil law ; 
and in any case, the Executive which declares martial 
law in Utah must occupy a position of most weighty 
and delicate responsibility. At the same time, it is 
beyond peradventure that whenever the United States 
Government finds it vital to make its power felt as 
paramount above that of Mormonism, and to do more 
than preserve the mere semblance of royalty in Utah, 
the only possible path to such a result is through the 

21 



322 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

court-martial. But I did not mean to begin political 
discussion so early in my acquaintance with Salt Lake. 
The traveller, coming into the Saints' City, either 
from the mountain or the desert side, finds much to 
expand his mind and rest his eyes. The breadth of 
the streets is delightful to him after squeezing his 
way through the narrow defiles of the Wahsatch, — for 
we judge of all things relatively, — and the Mormon 
Boulevards are as broad for a street, as the canons 
are narrow for a mountain pass. By survey, all the 
streets of Salt Lake City are one hundred and thirty- 
two feet wide between fence lines. Twenty feet of 
this width, on each side, belong to the sidewalk. 
The blocks, in the thickly settled part of the city, 
contain eight lots apiece ; each of these lots measur- 
ing one and a quarter acres — a most generous ap- 
portionment for any city proprietor. The blocks front 
alternately upon the streets running north and south, 
and those running east and west. For instance, sup- 
pose us entering the city by the " Emigration road-" 
— our faces directed due westward, — the lots belong- 
ing to the first block on our right front our street ; 
those on our left offer us their sides ; we cross the 
first transverse street, and the lots of the block on 
the left front us, while we flank the lots of the block 
on our right. An inconsiderable portion of the city, 
some distance to the northward of the Emigration 
road, contains blocks of four lots measuring two and 
one-half acres, and five-acre lots exist in some other 
blocks to the southward. The dwelling-houses, like 
the stores, are principally of adobe, with here and 
there a brick or wooden one, and an occasional build- 
ing, belonging to some more opulent Saint, of the gray 
sandstone or granite from the canons. By a munici- 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 323 

pal regulation the builder is obliged to set his house 
at least twenty feet back from the front fence of his 
lot, and to plant shade-trees along his street line. 
The effect of this arrangement, and the lateral isola- 
tion of all dwelling-houses which seems as strictly 
enjoined, is to give the streets a dignity and gener- 
osity of appearance quite independent of architec- 
ture. It is but twenty-three^ years since the advance 
guard of the first Mormon expedition camped down 
in the brush upon the site of the present flourishing 
and growing city, yet the wonderful industry and un- 
daunted faith of this remarkable people have seemed 
to infuse their spirit into the very trees, for the side- 
walks along the front of their court-yards are densely 
roofed avenues of living green ; the maple, the cotton- 
wood, the poplar, a species of acacia like our honey- 
locust, seeming to have thriven apace wherever the 
settler's hand has planted them, and at a more rapid 
rate than is anywhere witnessed in the East. 

Along the principal streets of the city exist some 
such pleasant exceptions to the dejected unhomelike- 
ness which I have heretofore mentioned, as character- 
izing; the g-rounds around Mormon houses, that I 
hasten with delight to give them their due. Even 
these exceptions are the mere external symboliza- 
tions of that higher grade of wealth and luxury dis- 
tinguishing all cities ; the gardener's paid work, not 
the wife's and daughter's sweet pastime, save in one 
or two cases (those the best) where a true marital love 
had kept a household, though Mormon, still mono- 
gamic. 

The space between the house and the front fence 
is manag;ed accordino- to the means and taste of the 
proprietor. In some instances, the utilitarian element, 

1 Countinsj from July, 1847. 



324 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

being in the ascendant, has boldly brought the vege- 
table garden forward into public notice. I like the 
sturdy self-assertion of those potatoes, cabbages, and 
string-beans. Why should they, the preservers and 
sustainers of mankind, slink away into back lots, be- 
hind a high board fence, and leave the land-holder to 
be represented by a set of lazy bouncing-bets and 
stiff-mannered hollyhocks, who do nothing but prink 
and dawdle for their living, — the deportment Turvey- 
drops of the vegetable kingdom? Other front yards 
are variegated in pretty patterns with naturalized 
flowers — children of seed brought from many coun- 
tries : here a Riga pink, which minds the Scandinavian 
wife of that far off door- way around which its ances- 
tors blossomed in the short Northern summer of the 
Baltic ; here a haw or a holly, which speaks to the Eng- 
lish wife of yule and spring-time, when she got kissed 
under the one or followed her father clipping hedge- 
rows of the other ; shamrock and daisies for the Irish 
wife; fennel' — the real old " meetin'-seed " fennel — 
for the American wife ; and in some places where tact, 
ingenuity, originality, and love of science have blessed 
a house, curious little alpine flowers of flaming scar- 
let or royal purple, brought down from the green 
dells and lofty terraces of the snow-range, to be 
adopted and improved by culture. Of all I liked best 
a third class of front courts, given up to moist, home- 
looking turf-grass, of that deep green which rests the 
soul as it cools the eyes — grass, that febrifuge of the 
imagination, which, coming after the woolly gramma 
and the measureless stretches of ashen-gray sage 
brush through which the traveller reaches Salt Lake 
City, almost makes him go to sleep singing ; grass, 
that silent ballad of Nature, whereof the dying bab- 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 325 

ble dimly caught snatches, because of all created 
things it best blends in with the Eden meadows 
dawning on their inner eyes as the outer glaze slowly 
on this world. 

Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, and Porter Rock- 
well, beside many other Mormons of less celebrity, 
have told me that when they first came to the pres- 
ent site of Salt Lake City, it was as arid a sand and 
sage barren as can be found anywhere in the plateaus 
of the Rocky Mountain chain. Their assertion is cor- 
roborated to the traveller reaching Salt Lake City 
from any point of the compass, by the sharply 
drawn boundary between fields fairly packed with 
harvest, smiling gardens, and orchards where the 
branches crack under their wealth on the one hand ; 
and on the other, tracts where no living thing breaks 
the monotony of sand and alkali but the ashen arte- 
misia, the cactus, grease wood, or salicorn. 

I asked the Mormon leaders how, under the cir- 
cumstances, they could ever have decided to found a 
nation here. Twenty years ago, the theory of soils, 
physical geography, organic chemistry, and the en- 
tire tribe of sciences embracing these, were inade- 
quately understood, even by technical people, profess- 
ors and the like, whose business they were. As to 
our best practical farmers, in comparison with many 
boys at this day in the higher classes of our scientific 
schools, they were so ignorant that they would have 
turned in dismay from the project of bringing the Salt 
Lake Basin under profitable culture. Among the Mor- 
mon leaders were none who possessed the advantages 
which we express by the comprehensive term of " a 
liberal education." Most of them were the plainest 
of plain farmers. Yet, without hesitation, they un- 



326 THE HEART OP THE CONTINENT. 

dertook to reclaim, for the support of man, a tract 
whose latent possibilities of cultivation, even at this 
day, would fail to present themselves by any exter- 
nal indication to ninety-nine hundredths of the best- 
read and keenest-minded men of their class. This 
soil is tractable. Indeed, its fertility is wonderful. 
But how could iliey know it? Or was it possible that 
the chiefs of the enterprise felt contented with the 
mere fact of putting between their people and their 
persecutors twelve hundred miles of unsettled wilder- 
ness, half of it a succession of giant mountain walls, 
with a coping of eternal snow ? What a frightful 
responsibility must theirs have been who founded 
the future of all those women, children, and old men 
(not to mention the able-bodied men) upon a guess ! 

But Brigham Young solemnly assured me that it 
was no guess. His contemporaries among the lead- 
ers indorse that statement. Their answer is that God 
bade them stop here. To the north of the city, along 
the Wahsatch range, they point out for the curious 
stranger a peak where Brigham Young, like Jacob, 
passed the night in wrestling with an angel. Going 
up alone into this mountain to pray at the close of 
the day when the people with him reached the first 
ridge whence an outlook could be obtained across the 
valley now cradling the Saints' metropolis, he fell into 
a trance of revelation. A certain shining one came to 
him direct from God and the martyred prophet, and 
telling him that the base of the range was his na- 
tion's goal, finished by a command to lead the peo- 
ple down into the plain, and there to found the city 
whereof the Lord had promised aforetime, " All men 
shall flow unto it, and be saved." By obedience to 
those heavenly instructions, the Mormons have made 



THE NEW JEEUSALEM. 327 

" the wilderness like Eden, the desert like the garden 
of the Lord." Thus, the establishment of the Salt 
Lake colony is without a precedent in the history of 
fanaticism ; for it is not only the grandest in its faith 
against all apparently rational likelihood, but the 
most fully justified by its success. After this, it can 
be no matter of astonishment to any reflecting mind 
that the Mormons unreservedly believe in a man and 
a system vindicated by results so imprevisible on the 
ordinary basis of human experience. As a direct 
corollary from this statement flows the irresistible 
conviction, that, of whatever else they may be guilty, 
the great majority of Mormons, from Brigham Young 
down, believe in themselves and their fanaticism as 
sincerely as the devoutest Christian believes in the 
Gospel of Christ. In view of all I have seen and 
heard, I could no more find room for the accusation 
of these men as hypocrites than for a suspicion of the 
sincerity of the most illustrious martyr in the Chris- 
tian Church. 

The truth, which they could not have known sci- 
entifically, because as yet Science scarcely knew it 
herself, was that the only element lacking to the util- 
ization of the Utah soil was water. Irrigation of 
course had been understood from the earliest antiq- 
uity ; but that this was the only need of a soil like 
that of the Great Basin, no one knew, for the fact was 
contrary to all external indications. 

In applying the process of irrigation to their city 
site, the Mormons performed an incredible amount of 
labor. Much of this, from their inexperience and 
their want of scientific education, was merely thrown 
away, or, more accurately speaking, useful only as 
" practice." They had to begin studying the prob- 



328 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

lems of hydraulics and engineering where their an- 
cestors began. When we see the blunders frequently 
made by nations building on that aggregation of past 
experiments and generalizations known as science, we 
shall not wonder that one painfully constructed con- 
duit intended to supply the Saints with water, refused 
to fall in with its builders' wishes, from the fact that 
it sloped up toward the city instead of down. The 
successful portion of their result remains. It is ample 
for their present purposes, and is one of the earliest 
novelties which strike a purely American traveller 
passing through their streets. 

On each side of the highway one is surprised to see 
a small, but rapid and unfailing stream, running in 
what we should call the gutter. No artificial means 
are taken to protect it. It is not piped, nor tiled, nor 
sluiced ; the utmost that is anywhere done for it is 
to pave its channel, two or three feet in breadth, with 
uncemented cobble-stones. But this is the aqueduct. 
From this open gutter, the inhabitants of Salt Lake 
City, now numbering between seventeen and eigh- 
teen thousand people, draw their entire supply of wa- 
ter for all purposes whatsoever. To be sure a few 
wells have been sunk in different portions of the city ; 
Townsend, our landlord, has one of them in his back 
yard ; but the supply which they afford is only a drop 
in the bucket compared with that running along the 
curbs, and even to the taste of a new-comer alto- 
gether inferior to the latter. 

All the earlier associations of an Eastern man con- 
nect the gutter with ideas of sewerage ; and a day or 
two must pass before he can accustom himself to the 
sight of his waiter dipping up from the street the 
pitcher of drinking water for which he has rung, or the 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 329 

pailful which is going into the kitchen to boil his din- 
ner, and into the laundry to wash his clothes. The nov- 
elty of the sensation, however, soon disappears when 
he pushes his investigations from street to street, and 
nowhere finds impurity of any kind mingling with 
the rivulet which runs clear and pellucid before his 
own door. Dead leaves and sand, the same foreign 
matters as the wind drifts into any forest spring, are 
necessarily found in such an open conduit; but no 
garbage, nothing offensive of any kind, disturbs its 
purity. 

Though there must needs *be some unmanifested 
legislation upon the subject, the water seems to take 
care of itself ; there are no regulations posted for its 
protection ; the gutters are under the surveillance of 
no visible police. A Mormon citizen need hardly be 
forbidden to throw ashes, or slops, or swill into the 
water on which he and his neighbors depend for com- 
fort, cleanliness, and even life itself I never saw any- 
thing done to mar the purity of this paragon of gutters 
by the littlest child or most ignorant stranger. 

But this gutter has an agricultural as well as a do- 
mestic function to perform. Across the sidewalk in 
front of every citizen's inclosure runs a narrow 
channel, sometimes tiled over, sometimes a mere 
open depression such as might be scratched with a 
hoe, leading from the outer and public stream to the 
inner and private domain. The simplest of sluice- 
gates, a smooth board, a mere shingle, shuts the curb 
end of this channel. It seems an easy matter to pull 
it up. A baby could lift it, speaking after the manner 
of muscles and tendons. But the late lamented 
Windship could not stir it, speaking "m foro con- 
scientiw.'' Starr King used to tell with great gusto 



830 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the story of a New England official, small, unusually 
small, in the respect of avoirdupois, but great in 
soul, who, on being threatened with personal violence 
by the malcontent whom he was sent to arrest, re- 
plied, " Shake me ? Shake me ? When you shake 7ne, 
you shake the State of Massachusetts ! " Similarly, 
the person who inconsiderately lifts that shingle, lifts 
the Church of the Latter-day Saints; and that, as 
my old pioneer Comstock would say, " is a pretty 
hefty pull for any man." 

The water of Mormondom, like everything else 
vital, except the contumacious air which has not yet 
been brought to its bearings, is the property and the 
concern of the Church. The Church therefore ap- 
points a water-warden, whose business it is to see that 
the supply gets apportioned on principles of equity to 
every man's close, so far as he has reduced it to culti- 
vation. Sometimes, when the previous winter's snow 
has been comparatively scanty on the mountain-tops 
(as was the case during the winter precedent to this 
particular summer of which I speak), great discretion 
is necessary in the allotment of the shares devoted to 
irrigation. A scheme is carefully laid out by the wa- 
ter-warden, calculated for the portion of the common 
territory which each land-holder owns, and showing as 
delicately as possible, by the necessarily rude means 
of measurement, just how much water per diem falls 
to the share of each cultivated lot in the city. With 
this scheme in hand, the water-warden daily goes his 
rounds, and lifts the sluice-gates accordingly. Thus, 
for instance. Brother Brown's lot is twice the area of 
Brother Perkins's immediately adjoining; therefore 
the warden lifts Brother Brown's gate from 9 until 11 
o'clock A. M., Brother Perkins's gate meanwhile remain- 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 331 

ing shut. At 11 o'clock Brother Brown's gate is shut, 
and from that time till noon Brother Perkins has his 
gate " histed." This system accords with a state of 
society patriarchally simple ; and the existence of such 
a state of society among the Mormons is sufficiently 
indicated by the fact that the misdemeanor of " hist- 
ing " one's own gate is almost, if not entirely, un- 
known to the calendar of the ecclesiastical court. 

Inside the land-holder's fence the apparatus for the 
distribution of his share to the thirsty soil is no less 
simple than effective. Across the land which he cul- 
tivates runs a net-work of shallow furrows or scratches 
connected with the channel coming under his fence 
from the gutter. As the water is let in to him it 
finds its way through this right-angled system of 
channels, and is rapidly drunk up by the planted 
squares between them. If he is an enthusiast in 
horticulture, and has particular beds or single plants 
which are his favorites, he leads a private tidbit (if I 
may be allowed that term for anything fluid) to the 
roots of his pet, by opening a temporary channel 
from the main furrow with his cane or the toe of his 
boot. The associations of Palestine throng every- 
where throughout Mormondom, and with special co- 
gency they came upon me here. I remembered the 
declaration of the Psalmist, "Thou turnest men's 
hearts as the rivers of water are turned," in connec- 
tion with another scriptural expression : " When a 
man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his ene- 
mies to be at peace with him." Nowhere on this 
side of the Holy Land could the preacher find such 
an illustration for the first text. The proprietor's 
foot made a little scratch toward the root of a Law- 
ton blackberry he was trying ; the activity he put 



332 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

forth was nearly unconscious, but the longed-for 
moisture crept toward the delicate thirsty spongioles, 
and by one slight contraction of a human muscle, the 
prosperity of that strange orphan, that banished scion 
among shrubs, was permanently secured. How much 
of the Bible's poetry we lose through our ignorance 
of physical geography! Henceforth to the Lawton 
blackberry, the cloudless sun, which had shone but 
to wilt it before, was a guide luring it upward with a 
golden finger. So the proprietor's furrow, scratched 
with a mere boot-tip, had instantly changed a curse 
into a blessing ; and the wilting, parching, blasting 
enemy was in an instant converted to the best of 
friends. The poor little spindling thorny canes found 
the sunlight "at peace with them," as the rivulets of 
water were turned to give them drink. This is but 
one of the multitudinous, even constant illustrations 
of some Old Testament statement found among the 
Mormons, whether they be citizens or agriculturists. 
Indeed, the whole Mormon polity is only a fresh 
realization of the elder and original Jewish life. 

The freshly arrived Gentile is surprised at the pau- 
city of women in the streets of Salt Lake City, and 
still more so by the appearance of the few who do 
manifest themselves. I had expected to find the 
feminine element largely predominating on the side- 
walks of a nation whose essential characteristic is 
disproportion of the sexes on the woman's side. But 
the settlements of Colorado (a Territory in which the 
disproportion in the opposite direction is something 
quite appalling) are gay with the ornamental portion 
of the race, compared with the thoroughfares of Mor- 
mondom. Any sunshiny day in Denver or Central" 
City brings out on the promenade a greater number 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 333 

of women than can be found under the most favor- 
able circumstances in the streets of Salt Lake City. 
I could only account for this fact by supposing that 
the institution of the harem, no matter where trans- 
planted nor by what race adopted, inevitably brings 
with it the jealousies and the rigors of Stamboul; that 
polygamy and the seclusion of women are fundamen- 
tally inseparable. 

Such women as appear are a further surprise to the 
Gentile, by their unobtrusive, unconscious demeanor. 
Not unnaturally, one expects to find the Mormoness 
either shamefaced or brazen. I looked for dejected 
faces, faces that knew, felt, and showed their owners' 
degradation ; or hard, defiant faces, glorying boldly 
in their shame. Nothing of the kind appeared. My 
mistake arose through forgetfulness that the social 
moralities are manufactured ; artificial, not natural ; 
man's temporary expediency, not God's eternal law ; 
that shame is merely the regret one feels, discovering 
himself ridiculously at variance with the usages of 
the surrounding majority. The poet is right by the 
lofty ideal standard (which nobody observes) ; en- 
tirely wrong by the practical standard (on which the 
whole world shapes itself), for, whenever the high 
ideal man gets grouped with others into a community, 
there "honor and shame" do "from condition rise," 
and, indeed, rise from nothing else. A public opinion, 
isolated from all others on one hand by a mountain 
system six hundred miles wide, and on the other 
hand by a desert of equal width, accepts of polyg- 
amy as the normal state of the race. Thus, on all 
principles of social morality, I, who had been looking 
to see Mormon women blush and drop their veils as 
they passed me, should have stayed in my room at 



334 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Townsend's, with my cheeks crimsoned by the thought 
that I was a degraded monogamist ! In fact, the women 
appeared like the respectable class of seamstresses 
common in any Eastern city, conscious not only of no 
degradation, but of no singularity. A person igno- 
rant of the system under which they lived, would 
never have looked at them a second time. 

After getting thoroughly rested from our sleepless 
ride of six hundred miles, we gladly accepted the 
guidance of one of our newly acquired acquaintances, 
and went out to overhaul the lions of Salt Lake City. 

One of the first places which we visited was the 
Theatre, or Opera-house. This was a comparatively 
recent building, but engaged our earliest attention 
from the fact that its interior was at the present 
moment lively with preparations for the coming In- 
dependence Ball to be given by the President. We 
were now at the end of June or early in July. My 
diary does not tell me the exact date, but it could 
not have been later than the first day of the latter 
month. 

The building was situated on one of the streets run- 
ning parallel to that Main (or viilgariter "Whiskey" ) 
Street on which Townsend's fronted. It was situated 
at a trifling distance from the presidential mansions, 
and belonged to Brigham Young, who had erected 
it not only with a view to furnishing accommodation 
for the amusements of his people as a state expe- 
diency, but as a business speculation. I am far 
enough from any inclination to state this fact as a 
slur. Brigham Young has no less right to make 
money than any private citizen; and it is creditable 
to his tact and foresight to have initiated an enter- 
prise which abundantly conduces to the welfare of 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 335 

the Church, while it acts for his own emolument. 
Here, once for all, I desire to record my conviction 
that if, instead of harmonizing, as in the present in- 
stance, the two interests of church advancement and 
selfish aggrandizement happened to clash, Brigham 
Young would not hesitate the fraction of a second 
after perceiving the fact to put his own interests un- 
der foot, and conserve those of abstract Mormonism. 

Without any such knowledge of the classics as 
might have informed Brigham Young how the Roman 
ruler kept his people good-natured by bread and cir- 
cus acting, the remarkable master of this remarkable 
nation, by his own shrewd sense and clear intuitions, 
from the beginning understood the vast efficiency of 
amusements as an element in the enginery of a rigor- 
ous government. While the " Social Hall " (a small 
saloon like those devoted to concerts and lectures at 
the East) seemed sufficient for popular accommoda- 
tion, the head of the " Latter-day Saints " gave not 
only the prestige of his approval and monetary aid 
to the institution which provided his people with in- 
nocent recreation, but contributed his actual presence 
to their sports, and (what was a still more perilous 
experiment, but abundantly justified by the result) 
personally joined in these sports, leading the dance, 
like Napoleon at the Tuileries. 

When the rapid growth of the population de- 
manded a wider area for the hours of its unbending, 
the President, taking the initiative as in all other 
popular movements, condescended to become the 
builder and proprietor of the first nominally consti- 
tuted theatre or opera-house erected within the Mor- 
mon dominions. The accounts of this enterprise 
belong to his personal ledger, and its use is granted 



336 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

to any organization calculated to further its purpose, 
at a rate merely equivalent to the interest on his ex- 
penditure in building and keeping it in repair. I 
have spoken of it as tending to his aggrandizement, 
but in justice I should substitute for that statement 
the assertion that it does not tend to his loss. 

We found the building a very plain one. Its fa- 
9ade was covered with a neutral-tinted stucco, and en- 
tirely without ornamentation, unless a surface broken 
by simple pilasters be considered as such. 

The front doors were closed. It was still early in 
the afternoon, and we visited the theatre quite as 
much for the sake of becoming acquainted with the 
people whom we were likely to find engaged in the 
overseeing or handiwork of its preparation for the 
approaching festival, as for a good view of itself. 
We passed by a narrow side-alley to the rear, and 
entered through a dark, tortuous passage, such as 
leads through the hinder part of any theatre at the 
East. 

We found the stage finely commodious, less so than 
that of the New York Academy of Music, but a trifle 
larger than that of Niblo's. Its area was not so well 
distributed as that of the latter theatre, the breadth 
to a certain extent being sacrificed to the depth; but 
the happy calculation or chance which made Niblo's 
stage as nearly perfect in its proportions as any in 
the world, cannot be expected everywhere, — even 
among an inspired race like the Modern Theocracy. 
No Mormon doubts the fact that the plan of the Tab- 
ernacle and the Temple have been revealed to Brig- 
ham Young, as was the pattern of the former edifice 
among the Jews to Moses ; but I suppose that even 
the most enthusiastic theocrat does not expect to 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 337 

have Heaven make out all the specifications for a 
Mormon Winter Garden. 

The air was busy with the sound of the carpenter's 
hammer, putting down the last planks of the tempo- 
rary floor flush with the stage, and covering the entire 
parquet ; and between the strokes rose a hum of 
women's voices, or above them every now and then 
a shrill call or a ringing laugh. The talk was poly- 
glot ; for among the sisters who were dressing the 
theatre were not only the elder comers and expe- 
rienced Saints, but recent arrivals from numerous na- 
tionalities. I noticed in the bustling little groups 
that sat binding the ropes with evergreens after the 
manner of an Eastern Christmas church-dressing, or 
supplied the binders with culled cedar sprigs from 
the big fragrant heaps, a number of fresh Scandina- 
vians, and many more of those unmistakable German 
hauennnen, whose short blue petticoats and elephantine 
ankles make such a large portion of the picture pre- 
sented by every station platform in the West where 
an emigrant train lies by on the switch. The Kat- 
chens and Gretchens had not lost a single one of 
those distinctive peculiarities which mark them any- 
where between Castle Garden and St. Louis, except 
that their big, honest, glass-blue eyes looked a trifle 
less dolly and wondering. Well might this be, after 
their bumps of the marvelous had been calloused by 
such tremendous thumps of impression as even a 
Yankee gets from twelve hundred miles of Plains and 
Rocky Mountain travelling, to say nothing of the pe- 
culiar and special blow which must have been inflicted 
on candidates for female saintship by the realities of 
Mormondom itself Otherwise they were the same 
sturdy, stumpy little peasants as huddle about the 

32 



338 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Battery on the arrival of a Bremen bark, with the 
same linty locks straggling from under their caps 
over full-moon faces of that curious color produced 
by tan upon a blonde complexion. The sun which 
had flooded them throughout their Overland journey, 
had only intensified the photography of Bavarian 
harvest-fields and Prussian turnip -patches. Inter- 
mingling, or rather forming interspersed groups, with 
these (for as yet they had learned no common 
tongue) were Kent and Surrey hop-pickers; sprightly 
"Welsh shepherdesses, brightestrcyed, sturdiest-calved, 
blackest-haired of all; Irishwomen (the smallest lot, 
as belonging to a race preoccupied by other than 
the Mormon despotism) and a few Americans, who. 
wherever they appeared, were the dominant sisters of 
the circle. I wandered among them, and universally 
found cheerful, contented faces, except where mid- 
dle age, attained before the peasant left Europe, 
had made indelible the traces of servile labor and 
hardship. Nowhere, however, could I find a coun- 
tenance which even so much as once in its life-time 
had been enlivened by the higher class of thoughts 
and emotions. The better brute faculties were rep- 
resented everywhere. Industrious patience, good na- 
ture, dog fidelity, sullen strength, — these were ubiq- 
uitous ; and I could well believe that in many cases 
the emancipation of such elements from the hopeless 
servility of peasant life in Europe had been a true 
improvement and elevation, even though the change 
had been from a professed Christianity into a real 
Mormonism. Certainly the monogamy of a Stafford- 
shire potter's hovel, or of a den in the mining districts 
of England, on the gauge of progressive civilization 
is several notches below the polygamy of Utah. Cer- 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 339 

tain apes are monogamic, but their females would be 
bettered by becoming women, though the transfor- 
mation involved their participation in a Tartar harem. 
Thus, despite our view of it in the absolute, Mormon- 
ism may prove, in transitu, a valuable ascending step 
to many wretched slaves among the laboring classes 
of Europe, who now are women but in name, bearing 
all the pangs and insults of the man, with an addition 
of maternal throes and wearinesses. I felt glad to 
think thus as I went looking about me among the 
new-come women dressing the Salt Lake Theatre. 
Here they were not doing field labor, hoeing, carry- 
ing asses' burdens. Many of them, in twining these 
pretty cedar wreaths and making these ropes of fra- 
grant greenery, had the first womanly work of their 
lives, the first work to be sung or smiled over, to call 
out the higher faculties of soul or fingers. Some of 
them ivere singing, many smiling, and I felt a mixture 
of pain and pleasure as I saw how awkward their 
features were at it. It was as if the facial muscles 
were taking an apprenticeship at expressing happy 
thoughts, and their hearts had a furlough to be glad 
for the first time. What struck me most strangely 
was the entire absence of representatives from the 
upper ranks of Mormon woman society, for compara- 
tively, at any rate, there are such ranks. At the 
East, even among the monogamists of a society so 
full of imperfections as our own, such like festival 
preparation rallies all the squires' and lawyers' wives, 
the ladies from the first village families, those who 
are conspicuous at the quiltings, those who lead in 
the Dorcas and sewing societies. No women cor- 
responding to those who make vestry -rooms and 
school-houses cheery throughout the week before an 



340 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Eastern Christmas were anywhere visible among the 
evergreens of the Salt Lake Theatre. 

On the stage I was introduced to several prominent 
men of the Territory who were superintending the 
work. They were capable, intelligent-looking peo- 
ple, and so well dressed that they might easily have 
passed for Gentile visitors. The day of religious 
costuming seems to have gone by everywhere. The 
" great human average " runs through sects as well 
as nationalities ; in cities at least, Quakers manifest 
their adherence to the meeting by their primness in 
the clothes of the world, rather than by the assump- 
tion of any uniform garb of their own. Similarly 
among the ruling Mormons, singularity of dress or 
hair-cut has fallen out of favor, on the very admira- 
ble principle of Goethe (I quote "Wilhelm Meister " 
from memory) that he who differs from his fellows 
in some chief particular should be all the more care- 
ful to conform to them in non-essentials. Thus a 
very influential Mormon then standing on the stage, 
and a son-in-law of Prophet-President Brigham, was 
really a surprise to me when I discovered his belong- 
ing to the Saints, since on Broadway he would have 
passed for a thriving Boston merchant or a Lowell 
manufacturer. He had the clean-shaven, keen-feat- 
ured face of a New England business man still cling- 
ing to the habitudes of twenty years ago. (I set the 
chronological limit to save the former epithet, " clean- 
shaven" which is distinctive of no class of sensible 
men at the present day, though occasional individuals 
of sense, through eccentricity or misfortune, are still 
found beardless.) The governing classes on the stage 
(there were several of that denomination) were as un- 
mistakable in the crowd of workmen and workwomen 
as they are everywhere else. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 341 

Out of all present, I recognized one man as the 
ruling spirit the moment I set my eyes on him, and 
it required but small discrimination of character to 
do so. He more fully met my preconceived ideal 
than any of the Saints I saw on that or any other 
time. He might have stood for a full-length statue 
of " The Mormon." Perhaps because my mind felt 
flattered to find its preconceptions so fully realized, 
even where some of them were not entirely just to 
the Saints in general, my attention had become pleas- 
urably riveted upon him several minutes before our 
cicerone had an opportunity to introduce us to his 
apostolic notice. He was a man apparently somewhat 
over sixty, but showing none of the infirmity of years. 
He was erect, portly, full-chested, broad-shouldered, 
powerfully made, about six feet high, and weighed 
two hundred pounds. Perhaps he was originally a 
blacksmith, as they say ; he may have combined that 
employment with the agricultural calling, which he 
afterward told me occupied his youth. He was built 
like a cyclops, at any rate. Everything about him 
spoke of rude animal vigor. His face was very strik- 
ing : a compound of keen wit, finesse, insight into 
character, with native sensuality enough to furnish 
the basis for a Vitellius. Perhaps it was the latter 
half of his face which made him satisfy my ideal of 
"The Mormon," and there I was unjust; for on close 
study I did not find that the basis of this remarkable 
people's fanaticism was laid in sensuality, — however 
much the fact of polygamy might superficially point 
to that conclusion. Neither would it be just to call 
sensuality this particular Mormon's governing trait. 

His bright black eyes were small and twinkling ; 
his well proportioned nose regular, but coarse. His 



342 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

cheeks encroached on the orbital cavities above them, 
and in common with his whole face were plufFy and 
blonde, with a glaze of sunburn from apostolic sum- 
mer tours. His lips were very full, and the expres- 
sion of the whole mouth lickerish as Falstaff' s ; his 
chin was double and shiny, from the twin effect of 
good living and close-shaving. His tout ensemble spoke 
a man who, to the utmost, relished and possessed the 
seventh heaven of bodily bliss, unalloyed by the 
slightest complication with poetic fantasies, undis- 
turbed by the least intrusion of metaphysical obsta- 
cles or problems. I am only as uncomplimentary as 
a photograph, — moreover, I can heal the wounds of 
visual truth, as a photograph cannot, by saying that, 
no matter how he looked, the man who had climbed to 
the second place in a nation of one hundred thousand 
people, was one of the most energetic apostles of the 
Latter-day faith, and shared Brigham Young's most 
intimate friendship, must have possessed very strong 
qualities whereby to accomplish these things in addi- 
tion and counterpoise to mere sensuality. Let me 
finish the statue before I engrave its name on the 
pedestal. This powerful figure is an exception to my 
recent assertion, that among the Mormons singularity 
of dress has become obsolete. His dress is not a sec- 
tarian uniform, nor is it absolutely eccentric ; still it is 
curious. One would not like to dress in such fashion 
anywhere out of Salt Lake City, nor even there, un- 
less he were an apostle. The costume consists (begin- 
ning as is proper from the base), imprimis, of a pair of 
plain but well blacked and polished cowskin shoes, 
with simple galloon strings running through two 
holes each in flaps and upper ; next, a pair of panta- 
loons, fashioned out of the identical buff and appar- 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 343 

ently cotton fabric, which twenty-five years ago was 
worn in the nursery by the author's contemporaries, 
under the agreeably Shemitic-sounding name of tian- 
keen (and which he may say, fascinated by its clean 
look, no less than its cool and pleasant memory, he has 
often sought for in the shops of adult experience) ; 
thirdly, of a vest identical in material with the panta- 
loons ; next, of an alpaca coat, whose pattern, though 
ecclesiastical, the ungodly call "shadbelly," but which, 
to unconverted ears, will be familiar as a " cutaway " 
or " claw-hammer jacket." Certain persons may won- 
der why I do not call the upper garment a dress-coat 
at once ; but the dress-coat varies, having no eter- 
nal principle about it, save the absence of front skirts. 
Its tails may be of ani/ cut, but the exact curve of 
the apostolic skirts is expressed to any American 
mind, familiar with camp-meetings, by the term 
" shadbelly." The aperture of the nankeen vest is 
cut to a medium depth, and discloses a faultless frill 
of delicately hand-stitched linen, white as a snow- 
flake fresh caught on the apostolic bosom. A narrow 
black stock, of silk, loosely holds the turn-down collar 
about a throbbing, manly throat; while, last of all ex- 
terior embellishments, a sugar-loaf hat, of the finest 
yellow Leghorn, puts the top finish on my statue of 
Heber Kimball. We were presented to him by the 
President's favorite son-in-law, Mr. Clawson. 

" Travellers are ye, heh ? " said Heber Kimball, after 
he had taken us in at the front of those alert little 
sparkling black eyes, and remanded us over to their 
tail for further consideration. " York ? " 

" Yes ! What made you think so ? " 

" Don't know ; kinder tell a man from York, allers. 
Came from there m'self. Didn't ye know that ? " 



344 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

"Indeed! Is that so?" 

" Cer-t\n ! Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, 'n I, 
were all neighbors when we were boys. Lived right 'n 
the same school-deestrict, Ontario County. Our par- 
ents came there 'n settled when we weren't more 'n so 
high" (the apostle flattened his broad brown hand 
about three feet from the ground). 

" I've spent months in Ontario County myself" 

"Where's that?" 

" At Clifton, where they have the Water Cure." 

" Don't say ? That's clos't' the Sulphur Springs ! 
Tew be sure ! I know where that is, perfectly. They 
used to have a ta-ar-vern there where the boys 'n 
gals went out a sleigh-ridin', 'n wound up with a 
dance. Ever out to the hill where Joseph Smith dug 
up the plates ? " 

" No, I've often heard of the place, but never had a 
chance to go to it " — 

" Yes, to be sure, that's in another direction. Well, 
I know all that country. Been in Canandaigua lots 
of times ; used to be our market ; there, in fact, we 
lived till they drove us out, when the persecution 
first began, ye know. We never had no fair chance 
there. But there the prophet of the Lord begun, and 
now — well, dont it seem a kinder cur'us ? " (turning 
to the President's son-in-law) " when I think o' all the 
way the Lord 's led us, it seems like a dream ! There 
I was down in Lake City yesterday, and Provo the 
day afore, and Payson and Nephi the week afore that, 
and the Lord was with us, and we had big meetin's, 
and the brethren and sisters all came in from a-get- 
tin' in the harvest, and the grain was all ripe for the 
sickle (turning again half unconsciously to the saintly 
son-in-law), and we had a Messed time ! 0, Brother 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 345 

Brigham spoke with power. We must a had a thou- 
sand each time, and though it was a putty busy sea- 
son with crops, the work o' the Lord was gay-lo-rious ! 
Right into the midst o' my talk about the valleys and 
the mountains whereunto them as is blessed o' the 
Lord is all a-flowin' to be saved, I thought of that old 
Ontario County and the deestrict school, w^here we all 
sot together afore the Lord called Joseph — seemed 's 
if the old place stood right afore my face : wall, I 
suppose the old county ain't much changed ; 'twas a 
kinder slow old neighborhood, anyhow." 

" No, I don't suppose that many changes have 
taken place since you saw it last. It's still a quiet 
farming country. Nothing, except the town of Canan- 
daigua, seems to keep it alive, unless it's the Sulphur 
Springs at Clifton, where there is a pretty steady flow 
of sick people as well as sulphur, — the one coming 
to get cured by the other." 

" That al'ays used to be a steady business. They 
reckoned it was good for the cattle before folks that 
had suthin' a matter o' them went there. The people 
that didn't like it said it biled right out o' hell. When 
the first trains were a-comin' over, before the Lord 
pitched our tents down here in the valley, we used 
to hear a good deal o' the same kind o' talk talked 
by the people. It used to seem kind o' familiar to 
me, and I said to 'em there was no use o' judgin' a 
matter before they heerd it, for I remembered those 
very Sulphur Springs of Ontario County; and here, 
right among the selfsame kind o' waters, springs the 
streams that is for the healing o' the nations. How 
long h'ye been here ? " 

" Only a couple of days." 

" Well, you must stay and get better acquainted. 



346 THE HEAET OF THE CONTINENT. 

Look around here ! What d'ye think o' this .? Some 
o' these women ha' only been here since the last 
train got in. There^s 'similation ! We work the ma- 
terial right in at once ! There's every kind here ; 
some o' them can't speak a word o' English." 

" Yes, so I hear. They seem very contented." 

" Contented ? Yes. Their hearts are ready to leap 
for joy ! These are they of whom it was spoken, ' All 
flesh shall flow unto it and be saved ! ' You must go 
around among us. It's a wonder to all who will be- 
hold. Why, sixteen years ago this very plot we're 
standin' on was the barrenest sage brush you ever 
see. Now, lo and behold ! the Lord is covering with 
his chosen all the face thereof, and the country round 
about. Where 'r ye stayin' ? " 

« At Townsend's." 

" Good man. Brother Townsend. Does a smashing 
business. I'll come and see you." 

" We shall be very happy, I'm sure." 

Thenceforth Heber took a vivid interest in our 
eternal welfare. He quite laid* himself out for our 
conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in the 
black shadbellj^, the nankeen vest and breeches, and 
the truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look 
like an Italian mountebank physician of the seven- 
teenth century. 

I have heard men who could misquote Scripture to 
suit their purpose, and talk a long time without say- 
ing anything j but in both these particulars Heber 
Kimball so far surpassed the loftiest eflbrts within 
my previous experience, that I could think of no 
comparison for him but Jack Bunsby converted by 
Stiggins, and taken to exhorting. Witness a sam- 
ple : — 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 347 

" Seven women shall take a hold o' one man ! 
There ! " (with a slap on the back of the nearest 
subject for regeneration.) "What d'ye think o' that? 
Shall ! Shall take a hold on him ! That don't mean 
they shan't, does it ? No ! God's word means what 
it says, and therefore means no otherwise — not in 
no way, shape, nor manner. Not in no Way, for He 
saith, ' I am the tvay, and the truth, and the life.' 
Not in no shape, for ^ a man beholdeth his nat'r'l 
shape in a glass ; ' nor in no manner, for ' he straight- 
way forgetteth what manner of man he was.' Seven 
women shall catch a hold on him. And ef they shall, 
then they ivill! For everything shall come to pass, 
and not one good word shall fall to the ground. You 
who try to explain away the Scriptur' would make 
it fig'rative. But don't come to me with none o' yer 
spiritooalizers ! Not one good word shall fall. There- 
fore seven shall not fall. And ef seven shall catch a 
hold on him, — and, as I jist proved, seven will catch a 
hold on him, — then seven ought ; and in the latter- 
day glory, seven, yea, as our Lord said un-tew Peter, 
^ Verily I say un-tew you, not seven but seventy times 
seven,' these seventy times seven shall catch a hold 
and cleave. Blessed day ! For the end shall be even 
as the beginning, and seventy-fold more abundantly. 
Come over into my garden." 

This invitation always wound up the homily. We 
gladly accepted it; and I must confess that if there 
ever could be any hope of our conversion, it was just 
about the time we stood in Brother Heber's fine or- 
chard, eating apples and apricots between exhorta- 
tions, and having sound doctrine poked down our 
throats, with gooseberries as big as plums, to take the 
taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor-oil. 



348 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Mr. Kimbairs city establishment (heis^ a large 
property holder elsewhere) is situated on a rise of 
ground but a few rods from the Temple corner and 
the President's inclosure. Dr. Bernhisel, a former 
Congressional delegate from the Territory, and a man 
possessing much influence as well as five or six wives, 
has a place in the same neighborhood, on the oppo- 
site side of the street. The houses of both are neat 
and commodious, but unostentatious, like the resi- 
dence of some principal selectman in a New England 
village. Utah has not yet had time to grow the 
noble elms which shade such a residence ; but every- 
thing which money, keen business tact and indomita- 
ble energy can do has been done by Heber Kimball at 
least, to make his place a paradise of luxuriant vege- 
tation. In picturesquely selected places he has con- 
trived to create pretty little groves of maple, poplar, 
acacia, and box elder, transplanting the young trees 
from the Wahsatch cartons, and by plentiful irrigation 
making them grow so rapidly that they had already 
attained the respectable height of twenty-five or 
thirty feet. In this matter of irrigation I noticed 
that both Brothers Brigham and Heber seemed to be 
" not under the law, but under grace." The chief 
water supplies of the Mormon city may without met- 
aphor be said to run through each apostle's back yard, 
and no hand but their own shuts the gate on their 
trenches. The lower level of Heber Kimball's place, 
toward the city, is a garden laid out under its owner's 
supervision by an old Mormon gardener (Irish or Eng- 
lish, if I recollect right) in whom he feels great pride, 
and to whom he evidently seems the greatest man in 
Christendom, or '^^ partibiis Geniiumr (I add the "or," 
not knowing precisely with which class to pigeon-hole 

1 I leave this account in the present tense, as written before its sub- 
ject's decease. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 349 

Mormondom.) The plan of the garden is as simple 
and natural as a path through the woods, the walks 
wandering hither and thither among intersecting riv- 
ulets, and under green arches of apricot, apple, peach, 
plum, and nectarine, whose pleasant -scented fruit, 
ripe already or mellowing to ripeness, bowed their 
over-weighted branches together above our heads. 
Heber's melons and cucumbers were very thrifty; 
indeed, the soil and climate of Utah are finely suited 
to the cultivation of all gourd fruit. It was a week 
too late for strawberries, or, Heber told me, I should 
have seen a sight, — Brother Brigham's crop had 
amounted to over eighty bushels, and he had gath- 
ered an almighty lot himself Heber was cultivating 
a kind of currant which he had introduced from the 
canons, and which by high science had been so far do- 
mesticated and improved that its fruit was very pleas- 
ant, having an abundant juice, less acid, and a flavor 
no less pronounced, than our own large white currants 
at the East ; furthermore, attaining the weight of a 
good-sized gooseberry. 

We visited upon the same grounds, on the bank of 
one of those streams heretofore mentioned as travers- 
ing apostolic back yards, a cider-mill, a grist-mill, a 
feed-grinder, a workshop with lathes, belts, and shaft- 
ing, and almost every conceivable mechanism for econ- 
omizing human power in the management of a large 
estate demanding constant supplies and repairs. In- 
deed, in both Brigham Young's and Heber Kimball's 
establishments one sees not the mere femie ornee of a 
proprietor living within hail of all the luxuries of 
civilization. Such a man can aiford to neglect do- 
mestic manufactures, — all that he wants, from a tooth- 
pick to a steam saw-mill, being manufactured within a 



350 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

hundred miles, and sold within a hundred rods of his 
park gate. Not so one of the Mormon Presidents. 
He must have his resources within his walls ; any day 
he may be in a state of siege. He has had to stand 
on guard all his life. From Ontario County to the 
Wahsatch canon, the Mormon's only motion has been 
a sullen retreat, facing the foe that drove him back- 
ward ; his only rest, to stand at bay or lie in wait for 
the same foe. He is the Manfred among nationalities, 
— spurned by his mother, Judaism, and by the chil- 
dren of Christendom alike. By dint of exquisite craft 
and perpetual presents, he has reduced the savage 
tribes of the Desert to allies of his strange religious 
scheme. But he remembers the time when his " La- 
manite brother," as he now calls him, had a disagree- 
able way of attacking Mormon trains, and making 
descent on Mormon ranches, and trusts him as one 
trusts a cat, though making use of him freely. He 
remembers Nauvoo, Missouri, and Johnson's army 
lying at Camp Floyd,^ inactive but insulting. Nor 
need he go back to Buchanan's time ; for there this 
moment, just across the valley, he sees white tents 
pitched on the hither face of his guarding ridges; 
and over the cannon which command his harem 
floats the flag of a mother who has spurned him from 
her door, and whom he hates with all the heart-burn- 
ing of a deformed and outcast child. Those iron 
throats that threaten to bellow at him, would not 
plead for him when his Prophet lay dying by the 
shot of the assassin, and his home was sacked by a 

1 The name of the great gun-thief of modern times has now been hap- 
pily erased from the list of our forts, — " Fort Crittenden " having been 
substituted for " Camp Floyd." It is a wretched compliment to Critten- 
den ; but bad as the place is, it was worse to call it Floyd. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 351 

delirious mob. He shakes his fist at them across the 
valley, and bides his time. 

AVell if the thought of Johnston past, of Connor 
present, were all that the apostles had to disturb 
them that sunny day I stood by the water-wheel of 
Heber's versatile factory ! They had also to remem- 
ber foes within their body politic, — the revolution, 
partly religious, partly political, which so few years 
ago Brigham was obliged to quell with cannon ; the 
burrowing discontents and treacherous schisms of the 
Legitimists, who look upon Joe Smith's son as the 
true heir to the Presidency, and more or less openly, 
as they dare, insinuate that the powers regnant are 
usurping a divine right ; and, last but not least, the 
miserable jealousy and discontent, existing to an ex- 
tent betrayed by the very pains taken to conceal it, 
among the wives of polygamistic marriages. They 
always tell how happy the women are, but it is the 
rarest possible occurrence for a Gentile to receive an 
invitation to any home or public festivity where he 
has an opportunity to examine this happiness for him- 
self You also hear it asserted that the Smith faction 
never had any existence, or is perfectly appeased. 
George Smith, Joe the Prophet's cousin, occupies 
high official positions, and is one of the most influen- 
tial men in the Church. This fact is pointed out as 
a proof that his family are friendly to Brigham's ad- 
ministration ; but the feeling in favor of the Smith 
succession is such a fanaticism among a large class, 
that no man of less ability and popularity than 
Young could keep it down for a week ; and were the 
administration overthrown Joe's son, or some Perkin 
Warbeck in place of him, would ascend the throne 
if only for a day and in the city. I think the Smith 



352 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

faction would worship anybody that looked as if his 
name might be Smith. There are other minor fac- 
tions whose existence hourly threatens the stability 
of the government. The Mormon Presidents may 
well live within walls, and have their materials for 
independent subsistence close at hand. 

Among other apparatus operated by Heber's water- 
wheel I observed a carding-machine, and was told by 
the proprietor that he had the entire gear of a woolen 
factory on a small scale, and when it was set, could 
manufjicture from the fleece excellent yarn and dura- 
ble cloth, sufficient at least for all household uses. 

Already (about July 1st) some apples were ripe 
enough in Salt Lake City to make good cider, as 
we tested. Specimens of the fruit we found quite 
spicy, resembling the wine-apple of New York State 
in size, shape, and flavor. One day, coming out of 
the vegetable garden on our return to the hotel, we 
were accompanied to the gate by Heber Kimball. A 
cow was eating the bark of a young shade-tree planted 
in front of his property, having burglariously broken 
the tree-box to get at it. Heber naturally waxed 
wroth, and cudgeled the cow away. Just then a 
keeper of the Church cattle passed on horseback, 
with a small drove in front of him. Brother Heber 
hailed him, and wished to know whose cow this was 
that had gnawed his tree, — was it the herder's, for 
instance? "It was not; it belonged to Brother What- 
d'ye-call'um, up the next street a piece ; he had a way 
of letting his cattle run loose." "Well !" said Heber, 
" this is the third time his cussed cow hez eaten a tree 
of mine, with the tree-box for seasonin'. Here, herder ! 
Take this critter, put her in your drove, and this af- 
ternoon drive her down to Church Island with the 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 353 

rest. If anybody asks your authority, say / told you 
to." 

Without a moment's demur the herder obeyed the 
second President. I did not ask whether Brother 
What-d'ye-call-'um had more than one cow, and 
could get along without serious diminution to his 
milk-porridge from the loss of this one. But that was 
of no consequence ; dictum est. That afternoon the 
cow went down to Church Island, and was henceforth 
as sacred as among the Brahmins, though in a differ- 
ent sense. She belonged to the Church herd — to 
give milk in life, beef, horn, and hide in death, for the 
advancement upon earth of the Saints' latter-day 
kingdom. Before I leave Salt Lake City I shall say 
more in extenso what relation " The Church " bears, 
not only to such waifs of emolument as this cow, but 
to every Mormon's entire property. 

During our stay at Townsend's, we were one morn- 
ing sitting on the veranda, when our landlord, a 
portly, kindly man, brought up a friend of his to in- 
troduce to us. It was Porter Rockwell, the Destroy- 
ing Angel and chief of the Danites. Apart from his 
cause, I felt an abstract interest in this old fighter, 
and was glad to become acquainted with him. He 
welcomed us very cordially to Utah, and told us we 
ought to stay : our only bad taste was exhibited in 
merely going through. We could not avoid telling 
him, with a smile, that Utah had a reputation for 
stopping people who showed such taste, to take a 
permanent residence. He answered good-humoredly 
that he had heard the rumor, and intended so far to 
verify it that he should halt us on our way past his 
door, when we started to cross the desert, put our 
horses in his own stable, carry us to his table, and 

28 



354 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

inflict on us the penalty of a real Mormon dinner — 
after which (if our horses had got through their feed) 
we should be let off with an admonition never to try 
to pass his door if we came that way again. " Bless 
yer soul, but we're savage ! " said Porter Rockwell. 
" Once drew a sassige on a Yankee Gentile myself — 
crammed it right down his throat with scalding hot 
gravy and pancakes. We Mormons torture 'em awful. 
The Gentile I drew the sassige on bore it like a man, 
and is livin' yet. Well, I'll soon see ye agin." So he 
shook hands with us, jumped on his mustang, and am- 
bled away as gently as if, instead of being a destroy- 
ing angel, he were a colporteur of peace tracts, or a 
peddler of Winslow's Soothing Syrup. 

He kept his word to us, seeing us soon and fre- 
quently. Next to Brigham Young, he was the most 
interesting man and problem that I encountered in 
Utah. His personal appearance in itself was very 
striking. His figure was of the middle height, and 
very strongly made ; broad across the shoulders, and 
set squarely on the legs. His arm was of large girth, 
his chest round as a barrel, and his hand looked as 
powerful as a grizzly bear's. His face was of the 
mastiff type, and its expression, fidelity, fearlessness, 
ferocity. A man with his massive lower jaw, firm 
mouth, and good-humored but steady and searching 
eyes of steel-blue, if his fanaticism takes the Mormon 
form, must infallibly become like Porter Rockwell. 
Organization and circumstances combine to make any 
such man a destroying angel. Having always felt 
the most vivid interest in supernatural characters of 
that species, I was familiar with most of them from 
the biblical examples of those who smote Egypt, 
Sodom, and Sennacherib, to the more modern Arab, 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 355 

Azrael, and that famous one who descended, all white- 
bearded and in shining raiment from the Judges' 
Cave, to lead the van of Quinnipiack's forlorn hope 
and smite the red-skinned Philistines. Out of this 
mass of conflicting and particular angels I had ab- 
stracted an ideal and general angel; but when I 
suddenly came on a real one, in Porter Rockwell, I 
was surprised at his unlikeness to my thought. His 
hair, black and iron-gray in streaks, was gathered 
into a cue, just behind the apex of the skull, and 
twisted into a hard round bunch, confined with a 
comb — in nearly the same fashion as was everywhere 
prevalent among Eastern ladies twenty years ago. 
He was very obliging in his manners ; placable, jo- 
cose, never extravagant when he conversed, save in 
burlesque. If he had been converted to Methodism 
in its early times, instead of Mormonism, he might 
have been a second Peter Cartwright, preaching and 
pummeling his enemies into the Kingdom instead of 
shooting them to Kingdom Come. No one ignorant 
of his career would take him on sight for a man of 
bad disposition in any sense. But he was that most 
terrible instrument which can be handled by fanati- 
cism ; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind 
of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and 
changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; 
in his humor, a Yankee lumberman ; in his memory, 
a Bourbon ; in his vengeance, an Indian. A strange 
mixture, only to be found on the American Conti- 
nent. 

In the forenoon of the Fourth of July, Porter called 
at our hotel to invite us to take a drive with him. His 
carriage was a large coach of the most ancient Over- 
land fashion, with a boot; room for nine inside (using 



356 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the swing strap in the middle), six on top, and three 
on the box. He had bought this vehicle at the auc- 
tion of a deceased stage company's effects. It used 
to run from Salt Lake City to Nephi, or some other 
Mormon settlement, and upon its emancipation from 
these diurnal labors struck the eye of the angel, he 
told me, as the fair thing to air the angelic " ole 
wimmen " and the little destroying angels in. It still 
bore its original coat of flaming vermilion, and the 
name of the company, if I recollect, which used to 
employ its services. It was just the chariot for a 
large family of angelic beings, whose wings had not 
been sent home yet. You could have piled all the 
old masters' cherubim, plus the supplementary legs, 
into the cavern of Porter's vast coach, without their 
troubling each other more than the souls in the old 
scholastic thesis who dance on the point of a needle, 
besides leaving room for the parental destroyers on 
top and box. 

Porter, in his desire to do the hospitalities of the 
occasion in the most graceful manner, proposed to 
mount the box, and take the reins himself. But we 
represented, as was true, that we should feel much 
more pleased and honored if he gave us his company 
inside the stage. We wished to converse with and 
see this interesting man, — not to ride behind him, — 
and so persuaded him to let a stable-boy drive for us. 

I do not know if I have stated that we had been re- 
joined by our two companions, who had preceded us 
on our way from Denver to Utah as far as Virginia 
Dale. These gentlemen, with Porter, our artist, and 
myself, composed the party that rode out to visit the 
Springs. 

These are situated at a distance of two or three 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 357 

miles from the northern border of the city. The 
road thither leads along the base of a peculiar series 
of hills skirting the higher ranges in all directions 
about the city; a formation principally limestone, and 
terraced in planes accurately corresponding, across 
valleys of upheaval and erosion that intervene. These 
mark the successive periods of depression for the 
level of that great sea which once filled the whole 
tract between the Uintah Range and the Snake Plat- 
eau, the Wahsatch and' the Humboldt Mountains. 
Every sedimentary rock stands the self-registering 
tide-mark of an ocean which man never saw till it had 
shrunk to its last puddle in the present Great Salt 
Lake, which knew no floods, and had long eras of 
rest, followed by ebbs comparatively short and sud- 
den, but outlasting a thousand generations of those 
pelicans, who, sole Smithsonians of the period, made 
meteorological investigations from the porphyritic 
pinnacles of their observatories across the sullen and 
solitary sea. In coming to speak of Salt Lake itself, 
I may give its geologic history more in extenso. 

Behind the terraced hills which bounded the north 
road and rose above it to a height of from two to four 
hundred feet. Ensign Peak, a lofty projection of the 
Wahsatch, came in view at frequent intervals. This 
is the Sinai of Mormonism, for it was on this peak 
that the Saints' Moses, Brigham, met the spirit of Joe 
Smith, and received his orders for the disposition of 
the people. This occurred in a vision, very shortly, 
if not the first night, after the tents of the faith- 
ful were pitched in sight of the valley. Near the 
foot of this peak gush another set of thermal waters 
besides those we came to visit ; and Porter showed us 
from the window of the coach the superannuated re- 



358 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

mains of an arrangement which had formerly been 
made to bring it nearer the Salt Lake citizens by con- 
duits and a bath-house. The Springs we sought were 
reached by a ride of about three miles from Town- 
send's, and the day being unusually hot, betrayed 
themselves as far as we could see by copious evapora- 
tions, like the steam of a large laundry ; hanging in 
the sultry air like an idle cloud over a mass of ragged 
rocks, on the right hand of our road. Reaching them, 
we alighted and spent more than an hour in their ex- 
amination. 

The rock from which they emerge is a limestone, 
belonging to the terrace formation, and stands at the 
foot of one of the bare gray hills which rise abruptly 
from the road. It is honeycombed and tunneled for 
yards, in all directions, by vents and channels. 

We were told that some of the vents eject water 
hot enough to cook an egg in. I suppose that this 
statement is true, meaning a soft egg. I explored all 
the basins as far as I could get under the rocks which 
overhang them, and found several crevices where the 
jets scalded on instant contact, as well as several 
deep pools in which I could not bear my hand more 
than a second. But water actually boiling at the 
surface was nowhere visible. 

Even in the hottest pools I was deeply interested 
to find fresh-water algae growing abundantly. I had 
snatched up the nearest pitcher as I left the Fourth 
of July confusion of the hotel, intending to bring 
back a sample of the waters. This I now found con- 
venient for the collection of the algae, and I nearly 
blistered my hands in fishing from the basins all the 
prettiest specimens within reach. They were very 
frail — more like a mucus or a jelly than a plant — 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 359 

yet, even to the naked eye, distinctly organized. 
Their cellular structure is even more visible, now that 
they are dried and lying before me in the book where 
I pressed them, than it was in the water which bore 
them. I much regretted having no good blotting- 
book in so much of our dunnage as we had detained 
at Salt Lake, but, on getting back with my algse to 
the hotel, made shift to use an old edition of Com- 
stock's Mineralogy, arranging the specimens on note 
paper, putting them between the book-leaves, and 
setting the foot of my heavy fore-poster on the whole, 
till such time as we should "break camp " for the 
Desert. The method of treating these algaB was 
similar in other respects to that observed at the sea- 
side in collecting their marine cousins, by lady enthu- 
siasts at the East. 

On reaching home with my pitcher, I emptied it 
into a pail of water. When I saw an alga floating 
naturally, I dipped my sheet of note paper under it 
(card-board, which is better, not being at hand), and 
slowly lifted it, arranging the forms with a pin, as 
nearly as I could in the way they swam. Some of 
them were a string of inflated globules, in shape like 
the bladder-weed of our sea-shore, but the bright- 
est transparent emerald in color. Others were only 
a viscous mass like " frog-spittle," with covered but 
certain traces of organization. Still others were tapes 
and coils of a tissue simulating fibre, — the former 
resembling eel-grass, the latter a fine moss or lichen. 
Several amorphous masses, which I poked asunder, 
broke up into distinct and evident organisms, coming 
under one or another of the forms described. Even 
more than the absence of our albums do I regret that 
of the microscope, which might have enabled us to 



360 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

examine these specimens in their fresh state. I have 
nearly a hundred of the dried algae, and hope some 
time to have them thoroughly treated. Their hues 
in nature were the emerald green I have mentioned, 
a delicate pink of the shade sometimes called French 
gray, a lilac, an ashen, an ultramarine blue, and a 
brown. Some of my specimens still keep their color 
very well. 

The average temperature of the water in the larger 
pools is 128° F. It is much higher than that under 
some of the jets in whose basins the algae grow. In 
midwinter the brook which runs from these springs is 
said to heat the air for many rods along the road, so 
that benighted people have often camped there as 
around a fire-place. Even on such a hot day as the 
Fourth of July in Salt Lake Valley, the air was per- 
ceptibly cooler after leaving the springs' vicinity. No 
other plant than the algae grew within reach of its wa- 
ters, nor was any higher organization than the vegeta- 
ble perceptible in them. That they do not contain ani- 
mal life no one can positively assert, — the Great Salt 
Lake itself, as I myself have tested, not being devoid 
of such life, though its azoic character was once uni- 
versally believed. Nothing of the kind, however, has 
yet been found in the springs. In the winter, ducks, 
geese, and an occasional crane or pelican, over from 
their cold side of the school-house at Salt Lake, with 
leave to stand up by the stove, huddle in the genial 
steam of the reedy level which drinks the springs' 
overflow. We now had only a few solitary magpies 
to cheer our way home through the hot dust. 

Porter Rockwell studiously avoided referring to 
Mormonism seriously, though he seemed willing 
enough to talk about it in a playful manner if any 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 361 

one else broached the subject. He was rough, but kind 
and conciliatory, in everything he said, and sometimes 
very amusing. A description he gave, accompanied 
by pantomime, of the way in which he had seen a 
Goshoot family sitting in a circle on their haunches 
when the grasshoppers were plenty, using their palms 
as scoops and "paying" the insects into their mouths 
with a windlass motion as fast as their hands could 
fly, was irresistibly laughable. It seemed strange to 
be riding in the carriage and by the side of a man, 
who, if universal report among the Gentiles were 
correct, would not hesitate to cut my throat at the 
Church's orders. It was like an Assyrian taking an 
airing in the chariot of the Angel of Death. I was 
not likely to become obnoxious to the Church: I 
certainly did not mean to be if I could help it. Knidw- 0»^ .'- 
ing I had been very careful along the way from the 
Missouri never to express myself before anybody who 
might be a Mormon spy, I felt pretty tranquil upon 
the subject of any change in Porter Rockwell from 
his present agreeable relation of entertainer to the 
less pleasant one of executioner, though an hour's 
study of him enabled me to say that though, if he 
had it to perform, less heart might be in his execu- 
tion of the latter than of the former function, there 
would be at any rate no less efficiency and sureness. 
He had the reputation of having killed many men — 
forty, report said; and there are not lacking those 
who suspect him of still more. From an eye-witness 
I received, while in Utah, the following account of 
one of his vendette. A Gentile doing business in Salt 
Lake City during Johnston's occupation of Camp 
Floyd, suffered oppressive exaction from the Church 
authorities ; and after failing, as might have been ex- 



362 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

pected, to get a decision in his favor from a local 
Mormon judge and jury before whom he brought his 
petition for relief, he retired in a most exasperated 
state of mind to the United States encampment, — 
partly with a view to obtaining redress through John- 
ston, and partly for self-protection from the Danites, 
with whom his prosecution of the Church had made 
him a marked man. One day Porter Rockwell rode 
into Camp Floyd. At no time during Johnston's oc- 
cupation was there anything but the merest farcical 
show of hostilities. Invader and invaded hobnobbed 
together at officers' quarters, over fiery glasses of 
" Valley Tan," (the demoniacal whiskey of the re- 
gion) ; Saints and Gentiles winked at each other from 
the jury-box to the dock ; the matters in dispute be- 
tween Brigham Young and Buchanan were treated 
by all classes as a mere technical squabble, in which 
nobody was hurt. Yet, though the familiarity was 
on both sides, all the confidence was on that of the 
army, which got regularly plucked in every trans- 
action, from the disgraceful treaty not to approach 
within forty miles of the city, to the buying of adobes, 
feed, and lumber. At no time during the burlesque 
of invasion was intercourse suspended between the 
Mormons and the camp. They drove a thriving busi- 
ness in huckstering commissariat supplies of all kinds, 
skins, clothes, and moccasins, horse-trading, and ev- 
ery other branch of traffic which can be transacted 
between the shrewdest of camp-followers and a petty 
force of soldiery, hundreds of hostile miles from their 
basis of supplies. The Mormons spoiled the Egyp- 
tians they despised ; and the only results of the John- 
ston expedition were an engorgement of the Saints' 
exchequer, the passing of a pretty additional sum to 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 363 

the already overloaded side of Buchanan's account 
with the American people, and the exacerbation of 
the whole Mormon body. Buchanan, through John- 
son, simply pinched the ears and filliped the noses 
of the Saints, whereas a private man, or a ruler of 
any brains, always gives his enemy a wide berth or a 
thrashing such as he never will forget, on the maxim 
(whose wiser Shakespeare never wrote), — 

" Beware 
Of entrance to a quarrel ; but, being in, 
Bear it that the opposed may beware of thee." 

In accordance with habitual usage. Porter Rockwell, 
on the occasion mentioned, rode up to head-quarters 
at Camp Floyd, and was sitting undismounted in con- 
versation with one of the officers at the door, when 
the aggrieved plaintiff in the late suit espied him, 
and approached in a violent passion. 

For several minutes this man publicly addressed 
Porter Rockwell in every term of vituperation and 
insult which an outraged nature could suggest, fur- 
thermore characterizing Brigham as a swindling old 
scoundrel, and the entire Church as his nice little 
game of thimble-rig. Not a muscle of Porter's face 
moved till this harangue was finished. Then he very 
quietly replied, " ! you shoot your mouth at me, 
do ye ? Well, I'll remember you some time," and 
rode away. 

A few days after that some officers came up to Salt 
Lake City on all night's leave, and, thinking himself 
amply protected by their escort, the exiled trader 
accompanied them. During the evening he separated 
from his party, and went alone into a side street to 
call on a Gentile friend. The officers never saw him 
again till he lay in their presence with a revolver 



364 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

hole from temple to temple, having been picked up 
dead a little while after he left them. Of whose pistol 
killed him, there is no eye-witness, and as little doubt. 

I have somewhat violated the successions of time, 
that I might bring into my picture of Utah one of 
the most prominent figures of the Territory. Before 
our ride with Rockwell, we received notes of invita- 
tion to certain festivities in the Mormon Academy of 
Music, intended for the commemoration of our na- 
tional independence. 

These festivities took the form of a ball, and af- 
forded such an opportunity for studying Mormon so- 
ciology as three months' ordinary stay in Salt Lake 
might not have given me. Though Mormondom is 
disloyal to the core, it still patronizes the Fourth of 
July, at least in its phase of high-jinks, omitting the 
patriotism, but keeping the fireworks of our Eastern 
celebration, substituting " Utah" for " Union" in the 
Buncombe speeches, and having a dance instead of the 
Declaration of Independence. All the Saints within 
half a day's ride of the city come flocking into it to 
spend the Fourth. A well-to-do Mormon at the head 
of his wives and children, all of whom are probably 
eating candy as they march through the metropolitan 
streets in solid column, looks, to the uninitiated, like 
the principal of a female seminary taking out his 
charge for an airing. 

That Fourth of July fell on a Saturday. In their 
ambition to reproduce ancient Judaism (and this am- 
bition is a key to most of their puzzles), the Mor- 
mons are Sabbatarians of a strictness which would 
delight Lord Shaftesbury. Accordingly, in order that 
their festivities might not encroach on the early 
hours of Sunday (or " Sabbath " as it is noticeably 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 365 

called by all sects who have the Jewish idea of the 
day), they had the ball on Fourth of July eve instead 
of the night of the Fourth. I could not realize the 
risk of such an encroachment when I read the follow- 
ing sentence printed upon my billet of invitation : — 

" Dancing to commence at 4 p. m." 

Our party, and a friend whose position as agent of 
Wells & Fargo ministered unto him an abundant en- 
trance everywhere in Utah, were the only Gentiles 
whom I found invited by President Young to meet 
in the neighborhood of three thousand Saints. 

We repaired to the Opera-house at 8 o'clock, feel- 
ing a certain degree of remorse at seeming so "stuck 
up'' as the lateness of our arrival must make us in 
the eyes of people who had been cutting pigeon- 
wings since 4 p. m. 

On entering the theatre, we were surprised to see 
how remarkably it had been improved since we stood 
on the stage in daylight, listening to Heber Kimball, 
and seeing the women busy in the preparation of the 
festive trimmings. Fragrant ropes of evergreen hung 
in symmetrical festoons from the cornice and the , 
edge of the galleries ; others wound spirally about 
the pillars, and wreathed the capitals. A great cen- 
tral chandelier was similarly ornamented, while in- 
terspersed among the pine and cedar were immense 
garlands and bunches of natural flowers, native and 
exotic, freshly plucked that day to lay upon Brig- 
ham's shrine. The lights were so abundant that in 
the galleries the heat was oppressive, and the whole 
house was illuminated nearly as well as could have 
been accomplished by gas. The boundary between 
stage and parquet having been obliterated by plank- 
ing over the seats flush with the former, the whole 



366 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

area of both was thrown open to the dancers, mak- 
ing as commodious a ball-room as could be desired 
by any pleasure-seekers in the world. A Mormon 
band gave vent to the music of the occasion. As 
they did not pretend to be Dodworths, Thomases, 
Koenigs, or anything of the sort, it would be unfair 
to criticise them closely ; but I will say that I could 
better understand that immemorial usage which has 
restricted Saints to the use of the harp, after hearing 
their performance on other instruments. They played, 
however, quite as well as the ball-room bands of most 
Eastern towns no larger than Salt Lake City, if we 
except those whose population has become somewhat 
Teutonized : and what they lacked in quality, they 
made up in quantity. The Mormon principle of de- 
voting to the Church one tenth of all a man is and 
has, was fully exemplified by the violins who gave it 
in the form of elbow, and by the trombones who blew 
that proportion of their annual increase into the ears 
of the Saints during the first four contra-dances. 
The merry-makers at any rate enjoyed the music as 
much as if it had been Musard's, which, after all, was 
the only matter of consequence. 

We sought out our entertainer, Brigham Young, 
to thank him for the flattering exception made in our 
Gentile favor. He was standing in the dress-circle 
of the theatre, looking down on the dancers with an 
air of mingled hearty kindness and feudal ownership. 
T could excuse the latter, for Utah belongs to him of 
right. He may justly say of it, " Is not this great 
Babylon which I have built?" Like any Eastern 
party-goer, he was habited in the " customary suit of 
solemn black," and looked very distinguished in this 
dress, though his daily homespun detracts nothing 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 367 

from the feeling, when in his presence, that you are 
beholding a most remarkable man. He is nearly sev- 
enty years old, but appears very little over forty. His 
height is about 

" five feet ten, 

The height of Lord Chesterfield's gentlemen ; " 

his figure very well made, and slightly inclining to 
portliness. His hair is a rich curly chestnut, for- 
merly worn long, in supposed imitation of the apos- 
tolic coiffure, but now cut in our practical Eastern 
fashion, as accords with the man of business whose 
metier he has added to apostleship, with the growing 
temporal prosperity of Zion. Indeed, he is the great- 
est business man on the Continent, — the head and 
cashier of a firm of one hundred thousand silent 
partners, and the only auditor of that cashier besides. 
Brigham Young's eyes are a clear blue-gray, frank 
and straightforward in their look ; his nose a finely 
chiseled aquiline; his mouth exceedingly firm, and 
fortified in that expression by a chin almost as pro- 
trusive beyond the rest of the profile as Charlotte 
Cushman's, though less noticeably so, being longer 
than hers ; and he wears a narrow ribbon of brown 
whiskers meeting on the throat. But for his chin, he 
would greatly resemble the best portraits of Sidney 
Smith, the humorist. I think I have heard Captain 
Burton say that he had irregular teeth, which made 
his smile unpleasant. Shortly after the Captain's visit, 
our benevolent President altered all that, sending out 
as Territorial Secretary Mr. Fuller, who, besides being 
a successful politician, was an excellent dentist. He 
secured Brigham's everlasting favor by making him a 
very handsome false set, and performing the same 
service for all of his favorite but edentate wives. 



368 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Several other apostles of the Lord owe to Mr. Fuller 
their ability to gnash their teeth against the Gentiles. 
The result was, that he became the most popular 
Federal officer (who didn't turn Mormon) ever sent 
to Utah. The man who obtains ascendency over the 
mouths of the authorities cannot fail ere long to get 
their ears. 

Brigham's manners astonish any one who knows 
that his only education was a few quarters of such 
common-school education as could be had in Ontario 
County, Central New York, during the early part of 
the century. There are few courtlier men living. 
His address is a fine combination of dignity with the 
desire to confer happiness, of perfect deference to the 
feelings of others with absolute certainty of himself 
and his own opinions. He is a remarkable example 
of the educating influence of tactful perception wed- 
ded to entire singleness of aim, without regard to its 
moral character. His early life was passed among 
the uncouth and illiterate ; any tow-headed boy com- 
ing into the Clifton Water-cure to sell Ontario County 
maple-sugar has, to all external appearance, a better 
chance of reaching supreme command than Brigham 
had in his childhood ; his daily associations since he 
embraced Mormonism have been with the least culti- 
vated grades of human society, a heterogenous horde, 
looking to him for its erection into a nation ; yet he 
has so clearly seen what is requisite in the man who 
would be respected in the Presidency, and has so un- 
reservedly devoted his life to its attainment, that in 
protracted conversation with him, I heard only a sin- 
gle solecism (" ain't you " for " aren't you "), and saw 
not one instance of breeding which would be incon- 
sistent with noble lineage. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 369 

I say this good of him frankly, disregarding any 
slur which may be cast on me as his defender by 
those broad-effect artists who always paint the Devil 
black ; for I think it high time that the Mormon ene- 
mies of our American idea should be plainly under- 
stood as far more dangerous antagonists than hypo- 
crites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice 
commit the blunder of underrating our foes. 

Brigham began our conversation at the theatre by 
telling me I was late — it was after 9 o'clock. I re- 
plied that this was the time we usually set about 
dressing for an evening party in Boston or New 
York. 

"Yes," said he, "you find us an old-fashioned peo- 
ple : we are trying to return to the healthy habits of 
the patriarchal age." 

" Need you go back so far as that for your paral- 
lel?" suggested I. "It strikes me that we might have 
found four-o'clock balls among the early Christians." 

He smiled, without that offensive affectation of 
some great men, the air of taking another's joke un- 
der their gracious patronage, and went on to remark 
that there were, unfortunately, multitudinous differ- 
ences between the Mormons and Americans at the 
East besides the hours they kept. 

" You find us," said he, " trying to live peaceably. 
A sojourn with people thus minded must be a great 
relief to you, who come from a land where brother 
hath lifted hand against brother, and you hear the 
confused noise of the warrior perpetually ringing in 
your ears.^ 

Despite the courtly deference and scriptural dig- 
nity of this speech, I detected in it a latent crow over 
that " perished Union," which, up to the time of Lee's 

24 



370 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

surrender was the favorite theme of every Saint one 
met in Utah, and hastened to assure the President 
that I had no desire for relief from sympathy with 
my country's struggle for honor and existence. 

The Opera-house was a subject which Brigham and 
I could agree upon. I was greatly astonished to find 
in the desert heart of the Continent a place of pub- 
lic amusement which, regarding comfort, capacity, 
and beauty, has but two or three superiors in the 
United States. It is internally constructed somewhat 
like the New York Academy of Music, seats twenty- 
five hundred, and commodiously receives five hun- 
dred more when, as in the present instance, the stage 
is thrown into the parquet. My greatest surprise was 
excited by the remarkable artistic beauty of the gilt 
and painted decorations on the great arch over the 
stage, the cornices, and the moulding about the pro- 
scenium boxes. President Young, with a proper pride, 
assured me that every particle of the ornamental 
work was by indigenous and Saintly hands. 

"But you don't know yet," he added, "how inde- 
pendent we are of you at the East. Where do you 
think we got that central chandelier, and what d'ye 
suppose we paid for it ? " 

It was a piece of work which would have been 
creditable to any New York firm, apparently a richly 
carven circle, twined with gilt vines, leaves, and ten- 
drils, blossoming all over with flaming wax-lights, and 
suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I 
replied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for 
it in New York. 

"Capital!" exclaimed Brigham; "/made it myself! 
That circle is a cart-wheel, the wheel of one of our 
common Utah ox-carts. I had it washed, and gilded 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 371 

it with my own hands. It hangs by a pair of ox- 
chains, which I also gilded ; and the gilt ornaments 
of the candlesticks were all cut after my patterns out 
of sheet tin ! " 

This is but one among a thousand illustrations of 
the versatility which characterizes this truly remark- 
able man. They are familiar to every Mormon ; you 
can go nowhere in the Territory without hearing 
them admiringly recounted by the people. As I 
have said, in the society sense of the word, Brigham 
is far from being an educated man. He knows nei- 
ther Latin, Greek, nor, so far as I am aware, any 
modern foreign language, unless, perhaps, like several 
prominent men among his subordinates, he has ac- 
quired sufficient acquaintance with the dialects of 
Shoshone, Ute, and other neighboring Indian tribes, 
to help in their reduction to the condition of tools 
and emissaries of the Church. I am not at all sure 
that he possesses even this slight lingual accomplish- 
ment, for, as I may hereafter show, the division of 
labor has been so clearly systematized, that even the 
business of learning Indian is apportioned chiefly to 
a class of Mormons who, when occasion demands, can 
assume all the other characteristics of red-deviltry, as 
well as the use of those incoherent grunts which con- 
stitute its language. Brigham's knowledge of mathe- 
matics stops at a moderate practical acquaintance 
with surveying, and the ability to keep books with a 
particularly cheerful credit side. Every deficiency 
in the matter of polite education which his enemies 
can lay to his charge, Brigham acknowledges with a 
simple-hearted frankness and an evident appreciation 
of the advantages denied his youth, challenging the 
admiration of all fair minds far more than any mere 



372 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

accomplishment could. In hearing him, one naturally 
feels that Brigham must possess some compensatory 
gifts and acquirements, in whose presence ordinary 
attainments become a matter of trifling moment, and 
that the man able to confess his weak places with such 
modest dignity has elements of strength within him 
sufficient to brace them, even in the most trying exi- 
gencies of his life. Among such elements, his versa- 
tility is by no means the least. The great American 
talent of un-cornerableness ; the habit of always striking 
on one's feet ; that Promethean faculty which in the 
grand passage where Zeus sends his blacksmiths to 
rivet the Titan down on Caucasus, ^schylus through 
the mouth of Force calls the ability to break away — 

" Ek twv aixrj^avu)V kukILv " — 

"out of unengineerable evils," — this, Brigham Young 
enjoys to a degree which I have never seen surpassed 
in any great man of any nation. He cannot be put 
into a position where he is at the end of his resources ; 
earthly circumstances never take to him the form of 
a ciil de sac. He has been at a college whose presi- 
dent is Multiform Experience, whose matron is Inex- 
orable Necessity. If he were obliged to support 
himself by farming, he understands soils, stock, tools, 
rotation, irrigation, manures, and all the agricultural 
economies so well that he would speedily have the 
best crops within a hundred miles' radius. With his 
own hands he would put the best house in the settle- 
ment over the heads of himself and his family, while 
other Desert Islanders in a ship-load of Crusoes were 
bewailing the loss of their carpenter. On Sundays 
he can preach sermons cogent and full of common 
sense, if not elegant or always free from indelicacy. 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 373 

On week-days he sits in the Church office, managing 
a whole nation's temporalities with such secular as- 
tuteness that Talleyrand or Richelieu would find him 
a match should the morning's game be diplomatic, 
and the Rothschild family could not get ahead of him 
if the stake were a financial advantage. On the per- 
ilous and untried road to Utah, he was faith, wisdom, 
energy, patience, expedients, courage, enthusiasm, 
veritable life and soul to all the fainting Saints ; they 
never would have reached the Rocky Mountain water- 
shed, much less the Great Salt Basin, without him ; 
he was the grand incarnate will and purpose of the 
Mormons' fiercely tried fanaticism; and though he 
naively said to me, in speaking of the height of En- 
sign Peak, " I got Brother Pratt, who had the book- 
learning, to take the observations, not knowing 
enough about such things to do it myself," there was 
not a " slewed " ox-cart on the way to that peak's 
base, at whose wheel his was not the first and stur- 
diest shoulder ; and after wrestling with angels or 
remaining instant in prayer all night, he could yoke 
up his team, and trudge along by its travel-chafed 
necks, urging it on with ge-haws as cheerful and get- 
ting out of his black-snake cracks as resonant as the 
lightest-hearted bumpkin in a smock frock. In a new 
country and an infant civilization, specific gravities 
take care of such a man's position ; he infallibly de- 
termines to the top of things, and will though he 
hide himself, less like Brigham than Saul the son of 
Kish, among the stuff! He must govern, because he 
is the only one of his lot who is necessary to every- 
body ; he is not elected, but he is ; not because he is 
fortunate, an heir of the past, but because among 
men he is the manliest, and thus what Homer meant, 



374 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

not the king of lands and coffers, but " ara^ avSp6v" 
— the king of me7i ! I believe that Brigham Young 
was brought out by Mormonism ; but I believe that if 
any other cause with which he might have identified 
himself had taken as strong possession of his nature, 
it would have developed him as fully, and that with 
the usual Christian creed and training, he would have 
made another Beecher in the pulpit, another Webster 
in the Senate, and a Sherman in the army unsurpassed 
by Tecumseh. 

I excused myself from numerous kind invitations 
by the ball-room committee to be introduced to a 
partner and join in the dances, because (though I did 
not give my reason then) I wished to make a circuit 
of the ball-room for the purpose of thorough physi- 
ognomical study of Utah good society. 

There was very little taste in dressing displayed at 
the ball, but there was also as little ostentation. Pa- 
trician silks and broadcloths were the rare exception, 
but these cordially associated with the great mass of 
plebeian tweed and calico. Few ladies wore jewelry, 
feathers, or artificial flowers ; and these adornments, 
when I saw them, seemed to have been drawn from 
trunks which had crossed the Plains and the Moun- 
tains, perhaps also the Atlantic previously to either — 
the breast-pins, and ear-rings being of that red gold 
and slender workmanship which delighted our revolu- 
tionary ancestors ; the head-gear of an exuberance 
so ancient that it has just completed its cycle, and 
become the mode again in this age of top-heavy 
belles with bushel-baskets of finery dumped on their 
heads and left to stay there higgledy-piggledy — just 
as a toy-watch, by standing still forever, once a day 
tells the time as truly as the sun. There were some 



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 375 

pretty girls, like those who came to Brigham, swim- 
ming about in tasteful whip-syllabub of puffed tarla- 
tan. Where saintly gentlemen came with several 
wives, the oldest generally seemed the most elabor- 
ately dressed, and acted much like an Eastern chape- 
ron toward her younger sisters. (Wives of the same 
man habitually be-sister each other in Utah. This is 
what Heber Kimball would call another " triumph of 
grace.") Among the men, I saw some very strong, 
capable faces, but the majority had not much charac- 
ter in their looks; indeed, in that regard differed little 
from any average crowd of men anywhere. To my 
surprise, I found among the women no really de- 
graded faces, though many stolid ones, many impas- 
sive ones ; but only a single face expressive of deep 
dejection, and this belonged to the wife of a hitherto 
monogamic husband who had left her alone in the 
•dress circle, while he was dancing with a chubby 
young Mormoness likely to t^ added to the family in 
a month or two. Though I saw multitudes of kindly, 
good-tempered countenances, and at least a score 
which would be called pretty anywhere, I was obliged, 
after a most impartial and anxious search, to confess 
that I had not met a single woman who looked high- 
toned, first-class, capable of poetic enthusiasm or he- 
roic self-devotion ; not a single woman whom an ar- 
tist would dream of, and ask to sit for a study ; not 
one to whom a finely organized intellectual man could 
come for companionship in his pursuits or sympathy 
in his yearnings. Because 1 knew that such a verdict 
would be received at the East with a " Just as you 
might have expected," I cast aside everything Hke 
prejudice, and forgot that I was in Utah, as I threaded 
that great throng. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

THE DEAD SEA. — THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND 
HISTORY OF ITS BASIN. 

We were distributed into two hacks of an ancient 
yet comfortable build, and carried a hamper of pro- 
visions to provide against the occasional leanness 
which is found in the larders of the only human 
dwelling at Black Rock. The day was bright and 
breezy, the ponies in good spirits, and the road in 
nice condition. 

The nearest point from Salt Lake City at which 
one may strike the lake by following a straight line, 
is only about ten miles in a northerly direction from 
the suburbs. The River Jordan pursues nearly this 
direction from the city to its mouth ; but the shore of 
the Dead Sea, where it discharges, is low, swampy, and 
uninteresting. The most favorable place to strike the 
lake is nearly twenty miles west of the city, the 
scenery there being beautiful and unique beyond de- 
scription. 

This point is called " Black Rock," from a weath- 
ered boulder of peculiar shape, projecting boldly into 
the lake at the extremity of a low reach of shingle, 
and may be regarded as the farthest northern ex- 
tremity of the Oquirrh Mountains, that lofty ridge to 
the westward of the city, which, with the loftier snow- 
range of the Wahsatch running parallel on the east, 
forms the cradle of the Mormon capital, and the more 



THE DEAD SEA. 377 

or less fertile valley of the Jordan. It would be 
nearer correct to call Black Rock the most northerly 
main-land extremity of the Oquirrh ; for Church and 
Fremont Islands take up the broken line of the range, 
and carry it nearly across to the great promontory 
which juts many miles into the lake from the north- 
ern shore to form Bear River Bay. 

Just after leaving the eastern edge of the city, our 
road crossed the Jordan, here a sluggish stream, eight 
or ten rods wide, with low fenny shores steaming un- 
der the sun, and exhibiting no signs of life or cultiva- 
tion. From the low wooden bridge straight west- 
ward to the Oquirrh, the land is an alluvial flat, boggy 
and reedy wherever it can be reached by the overflow 
of the Jordan, covered with a loose soil on the sur- 
face of the terraces marking those successive levels 
of elevation to which I have referred in speaking of 
the hot springs and their vicinity. On this ascending 
series of plains, no trees or large shrubs are anywhere 
visible. The vegetation of the moister portions 
chiefly consists of various sedges, rushes, and grasses : 
comprising an Eqidsetiim, or scouring rush ; a species of 
Juncus (the Balticiis, c[Vi.=Bidbosus?)', the blue-eyed, 
feather, hedgehog, and squirrel- tail grasses (Sist/rin- 
cMum, Eriocoma, or Stipa, Eli/mus, and Hordeiim); with 
a variety of Scirpiis, or club-rush, and of the Chara, 
or feather-bed plant, in the pools and marshes. On 
the higher levels, our old comrade, the sage, ap- 
pears again, and a plant somewhat resembling it in 
fetid pungency, the hemlock geranium [Erodiimi Ci- 
cutarium). The yarrow {Achillea MillefoUa) exists here, 
as, indeed, it seems to exist over the whole Continent, 
having followed us through every change of climate 
and physical condition over mountain and plain, from 



378 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the Atlantic side. The same may be said of the As 
clepias, or milkweed family, which, in the Rocky 
Momitains as well as here, appears in much greater 
profusion and number of varieties than at the far 
East. Here, too, are those other cosmopolites of the 
flora, the fleabane {Erigeron) ; the golden-rod, the 
mouse-ear, a variety of the evening primrose ; one or 
more of the asters; a gentian; the Argemone, or 
"horn-poppy; " the veined dock [Riimex Venosiis); the 
true and the bastard toad-flax [AntirrMmim and Co- 
mandra); a hogweed {Ambrosia) ; many leguminous 
tribes ; a species of thistle, a clematis, and the wild 
rose. These reveal themselves to minute research; 
in a single afternoon, and without going two miles 
from the road, a botanist, with well trained powers of 
observation, might discover them all, and many more 
possessing considerable beauty and marked interest, 
from the fact that they are peculiar to the region. 
But the country in its general view, as taken from 
the road, possesses no salient features. It is a dreary 
waste of sun-scorched brown, excepting in the spots, 
few and far between, where the stinginess of the 
heavens has been supplemented by human industry, 
and the melted largess of the snow-range brought 
down to nourish vegetable life by irrigating appara- 
tus in the form of conduits, where that is possible ; 
by windmills, pumps, reservoirs, and ditches, where 
the mountains are too far off to afford the quantity 
and force of water requisite for a steady current 
through the thirsty fields, or where the Jordan and 
its tributaries run in the immediate neighborhood. 
In the month of July the cereals are ripe for the 
sickle ; and Brigham Young himself told me that on 
a tract which he had seen, and belonging, if I remem- 



THE DEAD SEA. 379 

ber rightly, to himself, eighty bushels of wheat had 
been raised to the single acre. Astonishing as this 
crop appears in comparison with the best results of 
our Eastern farming, it did not surprise me after I 
had seen the standing grain upon vast fields, on 
whose irrigation no expense had been spared, and 
whose product was like a solid vegetable plush or 
green velvet, the threads in whose pile were six feet 
high, and so closely packed together that they had 
scarcely room to bend under the wind, and the field 
seemed to ripple merely on its surface in chasing 
waves of sun and shadow. Nor does it astonish any 
one who compares the soil of Utah with the analysis 
of those inorganic substances which wheat must de- 
rive from the soil. Sprengel's analysis gives the fol- 
lowing result for the 11.77 lbs. of ash left after the 
combustion of 1,000 lbs. of grain wheat, and the 35.18 
lbs. remaining from an equal weight of similarly 
treated wheat straw : — 

The results are expressed in pounds and decimals of pounds. 

GRAIN. STRAW. 

Potash 2.25 0.20 

Soda 2.40 0.29 

Lime 0.96 2.40 

Magnesia 0.90 0.32 

Alumina (with a trace of iron) . . . 0.26 0.90 

Silica 4.00 28.70 

Sulphuric acid 0.50 0.37 

Phosphoric acid 0.40 1.70 

Chlorine 0.10 0.30 

The decomposed 'feldspar and limestone which con- 
stitute the soil of the terraces, consist as follows : 
The feldspar, of silica, 64.8; alumina, 18.4; potash, 
16.8 per cent.; or, silica, 68.7; alumina, 19.5; soda, 
11.8; and in some cases of 20 per cent, of lime re- 
placing the other alkalies, with a nearly equal division 



380 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of the remaining 80 per cent, between silica and 
alumina : the limestone, of sulphates, phosphates, and 
carbonates in various proportions, the last frequently 
associated in the form of dolomite with carbonate of 
magnesia to the extent of nearly half the weight. 
Chlorine necessarily abounds in a soil which at one 
time was covered by a solution of its product with so- 
dium ; and were not sulphur plentifully supplied by 
the decomposition of gypsum, enough of it exists in 
the virgin state throughout Utah to furnish material 
for crops demanding it. In the sesquioxide, the sul- 
phide, the chloride, and numerous other combinations, 
iron is found throughout the detritus of all rocks 
which have formed portions of the ancient lake bor- 
der. A soil could scarcely be prepared in the labor- 
atory by artificial synthesis, better adapted for the 
growth of the cereals. The only desideratum which 
gives the Mormon farmer any anxiety is water. 
Even on the desert, the lack of this element is the 
only obstacle to a successful cultivation of wheat, 
rye, oats, and barley. In the vicinity of the springs, 
of artesian wells, or of the little rivulets born on the 
summits of the independent peaks (the " lost moun- 
tains " as the natives poetically express their isola- 
tion), and managing to reach the level without entire 
absorption by the hot sands, the luxuriant green 
which marks the oasis proves how rich the desert is 
in every solid element of fertility. Before leaving 
Utah, I shall endeavor to show that a large, if not 
the greater, proportion of all the barren tract now 
called " desert," as legitimately to all appearance as 
that of Sahara, may be converted by the outlay of 
comparatively small labor and capital, under the guid- 
ance of scientific enlightenment, into a district no 



THE DEAD SEA. 381 

less productive of all vegetable food demanded by 
the necessities of human life than the areas most fa- 
mous for fertility in the Genesee, Ohio, and Missis- 
sippi Valleys. At present let us return to our road. 

The dull, tawny hue of the bare ground, and the 
brown monotony of the withered vegetation, was 
strangely contrasted with the vapory gold of the at- 
mosphere, where it floated over the fens of the Jordan 
in a languid dream of midsummer and midnoon, with 
the intense blue of the cloudless sky, and the rosy sur- 
faces of the Wahsatch behind us, the Oquirrh in front. 
Both ranges looked close by ; the broken lights and 
shades seemed laid in as distinctly as by some delicate 
pencil, and the terraces or "benches" of the slope 
which faced us on the west, were as clean-cut as the 
steps of a temple. Nothing on the palette of Nature 
is lovelier, more incapable of rendition by mere 
words, than the rose-pink hue of the mountains in 
that rainless climate, unmodified by any such filtering 
of the reflected light through lenses of forest verdure 
as tones down and cools to a neutral tint the color of 
all our Eastern mountains, even though their local 
tint be the reddest sandstone. The Oquirrh has hues 
which in full daylight are as positive ruby, coral, gar- 
net, and carnelian, — at sunset and in twilight as posi- 
tive amethyst, jacinth, topaz, and opal, — as the stones 
which go by those names themselves. No amount of 
positive color which an artist may put into his brush 
can ever do justice to the reality of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, the Oquirrh, the Humboldt, in noon or at sun- 
down. 

The road was in good condition, and we reached 
the base of the Oquirrh in about three hours. Pass- 
ing around a low spur of the mountains jutting north- 



382 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

erly, we descended among bold limestone crags and 
masses of debris, scantily patched with artemisia, 
squab cactus, and the thistly Cirsium, to the level of 
the great basin. A mile or two further, and we got 
our first blue glimpse of the lake. A fifteen minutes' 
ride, and Black Rock rose grim and ugly, like the 
foundation of some ruined round tower, across the 
end of our road, seeming to shut it in. The beetling 
precipices of limestone, rent with innumerable clefts 
and fissures, came down close upon our left hand, and 
we stopped just where they crowded us to the brink 
of the sea. 

We had expected a grim and desolate landscape ; 
a sullen waste of brine, stagnating along low reedy 
shores, black as Acheron, gloomy as the sepulchre 
of Sodom. Never had Nature a greater surprise for 
us. The view was one of the most charming which 
could be imagined. Its elements of sublimity were 
many, but beauty was its most impressive character- 
istic, and the word "lovely" occurred to us instantly 
as its fittest description. 

On our left and western side, as we faced the sea, 
the lateral ranges of the Oquirrh decreased in height 
until they melted into vapory streaks of pale turquoise 
on the far horizon, their northward terminations 
forming bold headlands, or long, low promontories, 
with dreamy bays setting back into the indentations 
of the coast between them. The coast line in that 
direction had a southwesterly trend for about thirty 
miles from Black Rock, at which distance occurs the 
farthest point to which the lake extends southerly. 
All the headlands within sight — some of them ap- 
parently possessing an elevation of fifteen hundred 
or two thousand feet — exhibited that gorgeous va- 



THE DEAD SEA. 383 

riety and brilliancy of tints which we remarked on 
the faces of the Wahsatch and Oquirrh ; the lime- 
stone rock, in many places crystalline, shining in the 
sun like chased silver, or iron at a white heat ; the 
conglomerates, the metamorphic and the volcanic 
strata, here and there striated with bands of the same 
silvery lustre, but mainly characterized by different 
shades of red, graded from the nearest positive car- 
mine to the most distant flushed with a faint hint of 
pink almost evanescent, exquisitely delicate and ten- 
der, like the merest glaze of rose-madder over a 
ground of cream. To the northeast the shore was 
comparatively low and uninteresting, possessing the 
characteristics of that plain whose edge it was, the 
level on which Salt Lake City lies, and on which we 
had spent the three hours between the city and the 
Oquirrh. From our feet to the northwestern horizon 
stretched the sea like a pavement of pure sapphire, 
flecked here and there with drifting whirls of marble 
dust. It may have been imagination, but I could not 
help thinking that the excessive specific gravity of 
the lake-brine, even had we never heard of it, must 
have revealed itself in the heavy swing of the waves 
like that of quicksilver rather than of water, and the 
scanty, powdery character of the spray, like the fine 
dry grains of an unusually cold snow-storm. Directly 
before us, to the northward, the southern end of 
Church (or Antelope) Island rose from the lake — 
shaped like a lofty pair of pyramids, whose surface 
below the sky-line was broken into many smaller 
peaks of the same configuration, projecting from the 
main pyramids like the forms of a secondary crystal- 
lization. Those of our party who enjoyed reminis- 
cences of the Mediterranean found much in Church 



384 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Island to remind them of Capri. Singularly enough, 
the Mormons report a cave in a bold precipice on the 
former's coast-line which may carry the distant rela- 
tionship a step nearer by doing duty for a Blue 
Grotto. Certainly the most ravishing May-noon that 
ever shone on the Italian prototype never warmed its 
cliffs into a lovelier dream of color. At the distance 
of six miles from our stand-point, and seen through 
the screen of mellowing vapors which insensibly 
tinged the atmosphere above the lake, the whole vast 
mass of tufa, hornblende-rock, conglomerate, mica- 
schist, talcose and other metamorphic slates, gneiss, 
and limestone, seemed soft as a sunset cloud in tone 
of both of feeling and color, or might have been taken 
for a luxurious bank of roses set adrift to sway lazily 
on the long swells of some hasheesh-eater's Lotos Bay. 
Directly behind us, to the height of ten or twelve hun- 
dred feet, rose several successive "benches" or ter- 
raced planes of elevation — conglomerate near the 
base, but limestone a little higher, the sides nearly or 
quite perpendicular, in many places even overhang- 
ing, and threatening at no distant day to follow the 
example and share the fate of the great masses of 
debris at their feet, varying in the comminution of 
their fragments from whole detached blocks as large 
as a moderately sized house to the finest dust, some- 
times the accumulation of so long and undisturbed a 
period as entirely to obliterate the line of demarca- 
tion between the successive benches. Here and there, 
in the finer detritus, a stinted maple, a quaking as- 
pen, or a dwarf willow, belonging to some one of the 
many species found in this region, had taken root ; 
but with the exception of secluded spots sheltered 
from the direct force of sun and wind, the crags were 



THE DEAD SEA. 385 

bare of any vegetation more ambitious than the arte- 
misiaceas and certain little lanigerous plants. Far up 
the face of one precipice we were pointed out the 
entrance to a remarkable cave. Accompanied by a 
couple of my friends, I had the recklessness to clam- 
ber up the slippery tablets and tottlish boulders which 
lay strewn upon the glacis of detritus intervening 
between us and the lofty hole, but lost all confidence 
in caverns when I discovered this particular one to be 
merely a shallow recess in the limestone, nowhere 
reentrant to a distance of over forty feet, of the gen- 
eral proportions of a tin oven, and transacting an im- 
mense business of mystery (or what they call, as far 
west as this, " Shenandigan " and " ScuUduggeri/ ") with 
those who gape at it from below, on the capital of a 
dark, overgrown portal, as big as the cave itself I 
could extemporize as good a cave anywhere in the 
country by knocking one side out of a medium-sized 
cow-stable. On reaching terra firma (a distinction 
unusually but properly applied, as any one who has 
ever broken his shins on one of those stones which 
gather no moss and show no remorse will testify) we 
had the further satisfaction of learning that we had 
not been to the right cave at all. The discoverer of 
the right cave, an orphan cowherd named Smith, who 
"ran" the Black Rock Ranch, in the absence of pro- 
prietors still keeping Fourth of July in that vortex 
of brilliant revelry, " the city," told us that he had 
explored it for about forty rods, and seemed to like it 
as far as he had gone, though his descriptive powers 
rather failed him when he was called on for particu- 
lars. The cave had no name, he said ; so, after hes- 
itating in view of a question whether it bettered the 
matter, we advised him to give it his own ; but, with 

25 



386 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the modesty of all great discoverers, he replied that 
this had never struck him. One or two of the party, 
who had not already broken their shins for the fraud- 
ulent cavern, set out under his guidance to visit 
Smith's Cave, but came back unsatisfied, having omit- 
ted to take candles. The locality is a very likely one 
for such lusus naturce, or would be, were there more 
running water in the neighborhood to produce the 
phenomena of erosion. The rock in which Smith 
found his cave is a limestone, similar to that capping 
the conglomerate and metamorphic slates everywhere 
on the lofty benches about the lake basin ; a favorite 
stratum for Nature's operations in the line of subter- 
ranean architecture, and, in the abundance of sulphur 
associated with it under various forms, showing a 
probability of sufficient gypsum for the extensive 
manufacture of stalactites. The limestone stratum is 
distinctly carboniferous, and affords numerous indica- 
tions of the former existence of superimposed coal- 
beds, now destroyed by long exposure to the weather, 
or those volcanic agencies which have contributed 
heat to the metamorphose of the talcs, schists, gneiss, 
and other rocks in the vicinity still preserving their 
planes of stratification. In several portions of Utah 
— the valleys of Bear and Weber Rivers, of Silver and 
Sulphur Creeks — coal has been found ; also on the 
Green (or Main Fork of the Colorado) River, and in 
the Little Salt Lake Valley. The latter coals are be- 
lieved to be altogether bituminous ; but none of them 
seem to belong, like those of the Platte and head-wa- 
ters of the Arkansas, to the tertiary and cretaceous. 
I have mentioned in its place the coal which I exam- 
ined on the Platte, not far from Denver, as belonging 
to a very recent period j retaining perfectly distinct 



THE DEAD SEA. 387 

impressions of the cotton- wood, ash, willow, and pop- 
lar leaves, to whose deposit under heat and moisture 
its existence seems due, and of such imperfect com- 
pactness that it was impossible to coke it, its residuum 
after combustion being only a light ash, like that of 
burnt straw. Tertiary and cretaceous coal may very 
likely be found in the lowlands of the Mormon Terri- 
tory, but the limestone benches of the Great Basin 
and its affluents possess a true carboniferous charac- 
ter, as marked as any strata in Pennsylvania. 1 felt 
amply repaid for my barked shins and misplaced con- 
fidence when, on my way down from the bogus cave, 
I came upon a fragment of limestone whose face was 
stamped all over with the delicate daisy-like cells of 
the LUhostrotion. Near the same place I found another 
piece of limestone marked, in cross sections, with beau- 
tifully preserved stems of some crinoid. Stansbury's 
Island (with the exception of Church Island, the lar- 
gest in the lake, lying southwest of it and out of 
sight as we look from Black Rock) possesses a sum- 
mit of the same limestone as this by the lake-shore, 
and in it the expedition of the captain who gave 
his name to the island found the same corals that I 
found here — a fact which seems to corroborate the 
view that the Oquirrh ranges are continued through 
the lake. The variety of conditions under which, 
within a small area, I found the limestone existing 
on the cliffs above Black Rock, was very curious and 
interesting. I found an isolated piece of cretaceous 
lime-rock so soft as to be scratched by the finger-nail ; 
close by it a fossiliferous fragment ; and not far away 
a block so much altered by heat as to approximate 
the constitution of marble, while everywhere were 
to be seen masses of fine-grained blue limestone, un- 



388 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

altered, but traversed in all directions by infiltrated 
veins of beautifully lustrous and crystalline calc-spar, 
as finely pearly as aragonite, crossed and reticulated 
in such strange patterns that a polished slab of it 
would make as rich a mantel or a table as Carrara 
marble. 

Desiring to repeat mere arbitrary geographical 
names and measures as little as possible, I will dis- 
miss that portion of my Salt Lake material in a few 
sentences, quoting as far as possible from the report 
of Captain Stansbury. The circumference of Salt 
Lake is 291 miles. Its greatest length in a nearly 
north-northwest direction from Black Rock to the 
shore of Spring Bay is 75 miles. Its maximum width, 
measured along the forty-first parallel, is 35 miles. It 
contains six islands, the sum of whose circumference 
amounts to 96 miles. Church Island, the largest, re- 
ceived its name from the fact that all the stock belong- 
ing to the Church, especially the beeves and milch cat- 
tle, are sent there through the temperate season of the 
year to graze in charge of a herder. Whence it re- 
ceived its alternate, perhaps its original designation 
of Antelope Island I cannot tell, as I have never 
heard of any antelope inhabiting it within the mem- 
ory of Mormons or aborigines. It ranges nearly 
north and south ; has a maximum length of about 
sixteen miles, a maximum breadth of five, and rises 
in its loftiest peak to a height of three thousand feet 
above the lake, or more than seven thousand above 
the sea level. Far to the eastward of Black Rock, 
a shoal of compact sand connects the island with the 
main-land. In the summer this strip is left bare by 
the recession of the lake, and it is seldom flooded to 
a greater depth than three or four feet. Its surface 



THE DEAD SEA. 389 

is hard enough for the passage of every description 
of animal or vehicle, and it thus affords a convenient 
bridge or ford for the transit of the Church herds 
which pasture on the island. The island vegetation, 
like that of the main-land, is short and withered in 
appearance, but succulent and wholesome, as the 
condition of the ecclesiastical cattle testify. 

About ten miles to the northward of Church Island 
lies Fremont Island, about fourteen miles in circum- 
ference and rising to the height of a thousand feet 
from the lake, or more than five thousand feet above 
the sea level. Its shape was quaintly but not inaccu- 
rately expressed by an old hunter who told me that 
it was like a kidney potato with a good big bite taken 
out of one side. The bitten side lies to the south- 
west, and the whole circumference of the island is 
from fourteen to sixteen miles, according to whether 
one counts the undulations of the coast-line or not. 
Neither trees nor fresh water exist there ; but grass, 
the wild onion, a palatable bulb about the size of a 
plover's egg, called the sego ( Calochortus Luteiis), and 
the wild parsnip abound on it. In the spring this 
vegetation is so luxuriant as to cover the steep sides 
of the island with a verdure delightfully contrasting 
with the barren crags and burnt-looking wastes seen 
elsewhere about the lake. Stansbury gave it its 
present name in honor of its first explorer, who had 
named it Disappointment Island, from the fact that 
he had expected, from the vague report of the old 
voyageurs, a perfect tropical paradise of thick forest, 
luxuriant shrubbery, and wild game, but discovered 
only the small vegetation we have mentioned, and 
no animal life at all, except the colonies of wild fowl 
which frequent the sheltered nooks along the craggy 



390 THE HEAKT OF THE CONTINENT. 

coast-line of every island in the lake. I only follow 
the example of every traveller who has preceded me 
in preserving the tradition that here also, on the very 
summit, Fremont lost the cover to the objec1>glass of 
his telescope, and that Stansbury sought for it in 
vain ; an additional reason for Fremont's designation, 
since in this vapory region the cover of a telescope 
is not its least valuable part. The island rises steeply 
from the water, in some places with an ascent of 
more than forty-five degrees, with outlying reefs 
here and there of mica-schist and green hornblende. 
The composition of its rocky mass is variable, com- 
prising tufa derived from the feldspathic detritus of 
the older strata, conglomerate formed of water-worn 
quartzose and granitic fragments imbedded in a sedi- 
mentary matrix, and many metamorphic forms in 
which the clay schists predominate, these last often 
containing an abundance of iron pyrites, entire or in 
minute decomposition. This island does not rise high 
enough to reach the level at which the sub-carbonif- 
erous limestone would be likely to occur in a band 
continuous with that which caps Church Island and 
the main-land ranges to the south, but the lower and 
metamorphic strata which exist on it are sufficiently 
correspondent and cognate with those of the range 
to prove it a continuation of the Oquirrh. Near the 
summit is a very curious mass of schistose rock, per- 
forated by three immense windows, two of which are 
separated by a ragged mullion, and through them a 
splendid view of the lake may be obtained. From 
the highest table-land projects a castellated fragment 
which has led the Mormons to give the island a third 
name, so that one now has his choice between " Cas- 
tle," « Fremont," and " Disappointment " Island. The 



THE DEAD SEA. 391 

suggestion of Stansbury, that good water might be 
obtained here by boring, has not thus far been acted 
on. Thus, although the vegetation of the island is 
more luxuriant and varied than that of Antelope, it 
still remains tenantless, and, so far as I know, unvis- 
ited. The absence of such springs upon it as water 
Antelope, is easily accounted for by its less height, 
and its consequent deficiency in capacity and area 
for congelation, all the springs of the former island 
coming from beds which have received the percola- 
tions of higher levels, in winter covered with vast 
masses of snow and ice. Boring would undoubtedly 
reach water, but of what kind may be questioned ; 
the strata through which it would be necessary to 
pass in order to strike the impervious stratum dip- 
ping under the bed of the lake from the Oquirrh, 
and forming the natur/il water-bed and conduit from 
the latter's summits, being largely saliferous them- 
selves, and so friable as possibly to admit of transu- 
dations from the surrounding brine. At a sufficient 
distance from the lake shore to obviate the latter 
difficulty, the increased height of the island would 
largely add to the labor and expense of boring ; but 
it is certainly worth while to make the experiment, 
as the present abundance of small vegetation, and the 
richness of the rapidly decomposing rock in all the 
solid elements of fertility, prove that irrigation would 
make the islaijd one of the finest cattle ranges be- 
tween the Mississippi and the west slope of the Sierra 
Nevada. The " benches," chronicling successive pe- 
riods of the lake's recession, are very prominent 
around the coast of this island everywhere. 

About fifteen miles from Fremont's Island and, 
nearly the same distance from Black Rock, across 



392 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

that bay lying on our westward hand, whose deepest 
indentation is the furthest southerly point of the 
lake's extent, lies a lune-shaped mass called Stans- 
bury Island, although its insular character is part of 
the year entirely obliterated by the emergence of a 
sand-flat which connects it with the main-land not 
merely at one point, like the isthmus between Church 
Island and the lake shore, but along its entire breadth. 
It is the second of the islands in size, having a length 
of twelve miles, a circumference of thirty, and a peak 
near its centre, about three thousand feet above the 
level of the lake. As Antelope is the continuation 
of the Oquirrh, so Stanbury's Island seems to be the 
reappearance of a range running parallel to the 
Oquirrh, and separated from it by the Tuilla Valley 
about as far as that is separated from the Wahsatch. 
This valley is a basin corresponding to that in which 
Salt Lake City lies, though it differs from the latter 
in cradling no stream like the Jordan. As the 
Oquirrh dips at Black Rock to rise again in Antelope 
and Fremont Islands, so does this westward and par- 
allel chain sink at a point exactly due west of the 
dip of the Oquirrh to reappear in Stansbury and Car- 
rington Islands. Stansbury Island shows that it is 
the outlier and continuation of a distinct range from 
those of the Oquirrh system, by the difference in its 
geological formations. Its capping stratum is a black 
and gray limestone, like that of the Oquirrh, contain- 
ing multitudes of fossils belonging to the carboniferous 
period, both coralline and crinoidal ; but immediately 
beneath this the jumbled strata of conglomerate and 
metamorphic rocks found on Antelope and Fremont 
are replaced by deposits of a fine white sandstone, 
having in places an uninterrupted thickness of two 



THE DEAD SEA. 393 

hundred feet, even along the edges where they crop 
out. On the eastern shore springs of water are abun- 
dant, and vegetation is luxuriant. Above the springs, 
the fine silicious rock rises in magnificent clifis, whose 
shining white wall and castellated cornice, contrasted 
with the rich verdure around the clear, fresh stream- 
lets at their base, in sunlight and full-moonlight pre- 
sent a picture of inconceivable beauty. Still higher 
the island rises toward the central dome in noble 
masses of barren rock, piled step on step in that sin- 
gular imitation of basalt which we sometimes find in 
limestone, amounting almost to a deception concern- 
ing its lithological character ; huge foursquare pil- 
lars and cleanly beveled battlements, vast towers 
and^ frowning fortresses, with salient and reentrant 
angles succeeding each other, as if by the plan of 
some Titanic military engineer ; great cuh-de-sac and 
deep recesses cut into the precipitous face of the 
coast wall ; all these making the grandest effects of 
chiaroscuro as the light plays with their vast bulks 
and hollows, until the weather-rounded summit is 
reached at a height as great as the monarch of the 
Catskills, and a view breaks on the adventurous 
climber, comparing for rugged sublimity with any 
but the grandest of the two Sierras. The rich vege- 
tation and abundant water on the lower levels of 
Stansbury Island make it the finest cattle range in 
the neighborhood of Salt Lake ; and it would doubt- 
less receive the preference of the Saints over Ante- 
lope as a pasturage for the sacred herds, were it not 
at so great a distance from the city. Time out of 
mind it has been frequented by the Indians ; its easy 
means of transit from the main-land make it a fa- 
vorite retreat and browsing-place for antelope and 



394 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

other wild animals ; while the settlers of the Tuilla 
Valley herd their cattle there habitually. i 

Carrington Island, named after Captain Stansbury's 
assistant in the survey, is a mass shaped somewhat 
like a thick and clumsy fish-hook, with its heel 
placed southerly and about four miles from the 
northern promontory of Stansbury Island, about eight 
miles long from heel to point, six miles from heel to 
top of shank, and five miles in width, measuring from 
outside to outside across the deep bay on the north 
which separates the two members. It is separated 
from the eastern shore of the lake about as far as it 
is from Stansbury, by a shoal of hard, tufaceous rock 
which never becomes entirely uncovered ; indeed, 
reefs of tufa and sand-flats under water surround it 
on almost every side, covering an area larger than 
the island itself. It is without springs, but abounds 
in plants, many of them interesting both from their 
novelty and for their intrinsic beauty. The sego, 
before referred to, is very plenty; and Stansbury, 
who saw it on the 17th of June, when it was in full 
blossom, describes it as bearing lovely, lily-like flow- 
ers, which enlivened all the gentle slopes of the island. 
Its inner sepals are a delicate white, soft and creamy 
like the calla's, with a golden-yellow claw. " A large 
number of other plants were collected here, among 
which Cleome Liitea, Sidalcia Neo-Mexicana, Malvastrum 
Coccineum, Stephanomeria minor, a new species of Malaco- 
thrix, and Graia Spinosa were the most prominent." 
Limestone of numerous varieties belonging to the 
carboniferous seems the predominant formation on 
this island, suggesting the theory that the summit of 
the range has here dipped to the lake level; as the 
island, though possessing an acuminated form like 



THE DEAD SEA. 395 

the rest, does not rise to any great height above the 
water. 

Hat Island is a bare rock, rising from the lake five 
miles north of Carrington, and so called from its fan- 
cied resemblance to an old beaver. About thirty 
miles to the north-northwest of this is Gunnison's Isl- 
and, named after one of the officers in Stansbury's ex- 
pedition. It really consists of two islands, the smaller 
of the two, a mere outlying knob of rock, rising 
about a hundred yards to the northward of the 
larger, and once, as Stansbury thinks, forming a part 
of it. The main island consists of an irregular ridge 
of compact limestone, like the cap of the range, and 
the great mass of Carrington Island. Its indented 
coast is peopled with countless hosts of cormorants, 
herons, gulls, and pelicans. Its northward face rises 
almost perpendicularly from the water's edge to the 
height of six hundred feet ; a wall of limestone show- 
ing strata of both the black and gray varieties. Stans- 
bury reports that the space between this precipice 
and the outlying islet is occupied by a beautiful and 
romantic little bay, with deep-blue waters so crystal- 
clear that the bar connecting the islands is distinctly 
visible beneath the water. Ten miles further to the 
north-northwest, and about two miles from the west 
shore of the lake, lies a small mass of emergent con- 
glomerate, about seventy feet high at its loftiest point, 
and continued under water in a shoal about knee-deep, 
for a mile or more northerly. From the shape of its 
ridge, it has received the name of Dolphin Island. Be- 
side these, there are in the lake several small banks 
and rocks just large enough to moor a boat to, but in- 
significant and bare of vegetation. So far as I know, 
the only ones which have received any name, are 
Egg and Mud Island. 



396 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Having discharged my conscience of all duties due 
the geography and hydrography of the lake, I return 
to my party, who have by this time finished their 
cave-hunting excursions, unpacked from the vehicles 
the hampers of eatables, and set the discoverer Smith 
at work preparing for our dinner. Though the pro- 
prietors of Black Rock Ranch are still Fourth-of-July- 
ing it at " the city," the cows are at home, carrying 
on their important part of the business with a week- 
day steady-mindedness as prosaic as if nobody ever 
had a holiday or flung a torpedo the whole year 
round. Smith, the discoverer, has acquired something 
of their business regularity by association ; and the 
dairy of Black Rock Ranch groans through all its 
clean-scrubbed shelves and bright-scoured pans, with 
the rich yellow.produce of his herd. There are plenty 
of active partners in the ranch, too, to be found 
among the denizens of its poultry -yard ; so that we 
are going to have the royalest of lunches, on fresh 
country cream, butter, and eggs, beside a big kettle- 
ful of that savory prepared coffee, whose solid basis, 
to the extent of two tin boxes full, we had brought 
with us from our own travelling stores, and whose 
invaluable assistance in getting up hasty camp break- 
fasts we have had occasion so often to acknowledge in 
crossing the Plains and the mountains, and bivouack- 
ing on the hunting grounds of our Western country. 
Besides these luxuries were a quantity of cold broiled 
chicken, some loaves of sweet home-made bread con- 
structed from Utah wheat, a boiled ham, half a dozen 
boxes of sardines, a jar of Crosse & Blackwell's 
chow-chow, another of Shaker apple-butter, and still 
another of hermetically sealed tomatoes, — some of 
these articles drawn from our own commissariat, and 



THE DEAD SEA. 397 

a part packed into our hamper by one of the Mes- 
dames Townsend. While the discoverer was busy 
setting the tables and building a roaring fire in the 
kitchen to prepare our grub, we found a spare quar- 
ter of an hour on our hands, which it was decided, by 
a unanimous vote, could be no better spent than in 
making the better acquaintance of Salt Lake by a 
plunge into its bosom. 

We undressed in the kitchen of the ranch, and had 
only about half a dozen rods to walk to the water's 
edge. The beach was very disagreeable, consisting 
of flinty rock fragments, sharp as a razor, from one 
to eighteen inches long, and all seeming to he edge 
and point upward. At every step some cut or 
bruised foot came up with a jerk and a yell from its 
indignant owner, and self-gratulations were profuse 
when we reached the water. But our rejoicing was 
short-lived. The exchange was, if possible, of bad 
for worse. The water deepened very gradually ; and 
after wetting our feet, we had to walk further to 
reach a swimming depth than we had previously 
come from the kitchen. The mangling chunks of 
stone were no longer visible, but they were still 
there, and tangible as ever. Worse yet, it was not 
sand which covered them out of sight, but a layer of 
black mud six inches thick, through which the foot 
sank to its torture bed of spikes below, as through 
the fine silt of a sewer, or a compost -heap. No 
words can do justice to the filthiness of this Stygian 
mire. Every sense to which it appealed, recoiled in 
loathing. It felt like a clammy paste of rottenness, 
much colder than the water above, and sent a chilly 
shudder of horror crawling up one's spinal marrow, 
as one foot came up with a disgusting thlupp, and the 



398 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

other sunk deeper with the vile stuff oozing lup be- 
tween its toes ; it dyed the clear blue brine, wherever 
it was disturbed, a black like foul ink diffusing itself 
in clouds for two yards round; and its smell, — what 
word-perfumer can do justice to that ? It was rotten- 
ness itself The worst odor of putrefaction that ever 
sickened me elsewhere, was night-blooming cereus 
compared with it ; it would have turned the stom- 
ach of a turkey-buzzard or a ghoul. I had the hardi- 
hood to examine it, and found that it consisted of 
the decomposed larvae of some insect like the mos- 
quito. But where had the tenants of these cast-off 
dwellings gone ? We were never troubled with mos- 
quitos or gnats at Salt Lake, either in the city or 
any other portion of the region ; yet the larv93 pres- 
ent along a rod of that shore represented a host of 
those midnight assassins large enough to have driven 
all Utah Territory stark mad, and sucked every Saint 
in it dry as parchment, though its population were as 
densely packed as that of China. At that time I had 
read nothing written by other explorers, and having 
only heard the commonly received report that Salt 
Lake, like the Dead Sea, is an absolutely azoic body 
of water, supposed I had made a new discovery in 
ascertaining the existence of insect remains there. 
Since then I learn, through Captain Stansbury, that 
the foul mass was examined by Mr. T. B. Peale, who 
pronounced it to consist, nine tenths of larvae and 
exuviae of Chirononms, or some species of mosquito 
probably undescribed; the remainder of fragments 
of other aquatic diptera and hymenoptera, both in 
the pupa and the mature state. Deposits similar to 
this at Black Rock are found in all the shallow bays 
of the lake, extending in layers a foot deep over 



THE DEAD SEA. 899 

areas of many hundred acres in extent, and always 
horrible in their fetor, blackening the water like cut- 
tle-fish fluid, and producing an overwhelming nausea 
wherever they were stirred up. Neither Mr. Peale 
nor Captain Stansbury could arrive at any theory 
adequate for the explanation of the vast quantity in 
which the exuviae appeared. The latter, on page 177 
of his most interesting report, says : " The question 
where these larvae originated, presents a curious sub- 
ject of inquiry. Nothing living has yet been de- 
tected in the lake, and only a few large insects in 
the brackish springs, which do not at all resemble 
these either in shape or size." I have seen no obser- 
vations since his which throw any light upon the sub- 
ject, unless my own be deemed thus successful. 1 did 
detect something living in the lake water, though 
whether its connection with the larvae be capable of 
making out I am not prepared to say. I brought 
back from the lake to Townsend's a quart-bottle of 
the water, gathered near the shore, but without dis- 
turbing the filthy deposit, and placed it in a west 
window, where it had the sun for the last five hours 
of the afternoon. For the first day or two the water 
remained perfectly clear. About the third day I ob- 
served small vermicular animals in it. I then neg- 
lected it until I came to pack the bottle the night 
before leaving, — ■ it may have been a week from the 
time of my visit to Salt Lake. Then for the first 
time I discovered a number of minute diptera float- 
ing in it dead. They resembled, in all but size, our 
common house-fly, or the Platte River buffalo-gnat, 
rather than a mosquito. It then struck me as pos- 
sible that the great number of these larvae deposited 
on the lake bottom may be accounted for by suppos- 



400 IHE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ing a species whose rapidity of transit througl) their 
various stages of existence was as great as that of 
the insects found in my bottle, and whose mature 
life in the winged state was merely ephemeral. I 
think my experiment, in spite of its rudeness, still 
free from most of the sources of error. The water 
was so clear when I bottled it that I certainly should 
have seen any object as large as the dead flies I 
finally found there ; and as the bottle was never for 
a moment uncorked, their eventual existence in it 
could not be accounted for by their having entered 
in their winged state at the hotel, and perished there. 
I am therefore compelled to believe that the micro- 
scopic ova of some aquatic dipterous species were 
suspended in the lake water when I bottled it ; that 
they hatched into the grub state in the sunlight at 
my window, appearing as the worms I first noticed ; 
and the flies were their matured form (the sediment 
at the bottom containing their pupae), dead when I 
found them, either because they had no means of es- 
cape into the air, or because they were ephemeral, 
and had run their full cycle. I cannot account for 
the existence of such vast masses of exuviae in the 
lake on the ground that they are the sloughs of an 
extinct race or of an extant one accumulated through 
many ages, as the preservation of their forms, and the 
still active putrefaction at whose expense the terrible 
stench is kept up, necessitate a comparatively recent 
origin. It seems strange how such putrefaction can 
go on anj^how in a pickle as strong as that of Salt 
Lake ; but the probable truth is that it is commenced 
in the open air and hot sun, where the exuviae are 
cast up by the waves on the beach. 

I leave a subject which would be wholly unpleasant 



THE DEAD SEA. 401 

but for its bearings on the interesting scientific ques- 
tion whether or not Salt Lake is uninhabited, with a 
passing reference to the fact that Governor Cummings 
mentioned to Captain Burton his having seen in the 
lake a reddish vermicular animal, about as long as the 
top joint of his little finger, who had spun himself a 
sheltering web inside of a curled leaf a few inches 
long. This may be some new variety of the caddis- 
worm, and it would be an interesting subject for ex- 
amination. 

After wading this sty of -concentrated nastiness 
(which nothing ever pushed me through but scientific 
enthusiasm, and the reflection how ashamed I should 
hereafter be if compelled to acknowledge that I had 
stood on the Salt Lake margin, without having 
breasted its waters), I came, nearly a hundred feet 
from shore, into a depth where I could comfortably 
swim. Once fairly in, I found the water very exhil- 
arating. It was as cold to the feel as the ocean at 
Long Branch in the bathing season, and from this 
cause, with its intense brininess in addition, gave me 
a tonic sensation like a brisk shower-bath. I felt 
none of the acidity and burning with which the lake 
affects some skins — only a pleasant pungent sense of 
being in pickle, such as a self-conscious gherkin might 
experience in Cross & Blackwell's aristocratic bath 
of condiments, after he had set his mind at rest about 
copper by reading the assurance on the label, and 
intrusted himself with full abandon to his luxurious 
immersion. I swam out about twenty rods into the 
lake, and supposed I must certainly be a long way 
beyond my depth, so stopped to tread water and 
look about me. As I threw my feet down, to my ut- 
ter surprise they touched bottom again j and the way 



402 THE HEART OF TPIE CONTINENT. 

that I put out for the open sea, remembering the 
horrible pit and miry clay, was a caution ! I had to 
get some distance beyond the line of Black Rock be- 
fore I found water over my head. At that time I had 
no idea of what a shallow puddle the Great Salt Lake 
was. I thought, as I suppose most people do, that it 
was at least a thousand feet deep in the middle, and 
shelved oif rapidly from the bold limestone precipices 
which wall it at Black Rock. Instead of that, it is 
almost everywhere bordered by shallows, reaching 
from a hundred rods to several miles from the shore ; 
and the very deepest place found by that most 
minute and painstaking of hydrographers, Captain 
Stansbury, after innumerable soundings in every di- 
rection throughout the lake, was only thirty-five feet ! 
In some portions of the lake, many miles from either 
shore, I might have swam for half a day without get- 
ting beyond my depth. 

In common with all travellers, I experienced the 
most curious sensations of over-buoyancy. Without 
special effort, it was impossible to keep myself under 
sufficiently to have it feel like swimming, and not like 
lying on a sort of India rubber bed, where I made no 
break, but only a dent in some elastic substance which 
sprung under me. When I trod water, my bust 
emerged to considerably below the armpits ; when I 
lay prone or on my back, so much of the uppermost 
surface was exposed that I had to change my position 
frequently, in order to keep myself uniformly wet, 
so as not to be scorched by the perpendicular rays of 
the midsummer sun. It would be a splendid place 
for a swimming-school. No confidence need be taught 
there — nothing but the motions. And a more de- 
lightful gamboling-place cannot be imagined. I was 



THE DEAD SEA. 403 

always passionately fond of swimming ; and after my 
long, dry, dusty ride across the plains and moun- 
tains, where I had enjoyed no bath with ample room 
to disport myself, or indeed any swim at all since I 
ducked in the crystal flood of the " Fonten-kee-boo- 
yeh " at the base of Pike's Peak, it may be conceived 
that I rioted in the bracing blue brine of Utah with a 
perfect boyish delight. I could scarcely bear to leave 
it, even to the dinner for which my clamber and my 
swim had procured me an appetite as boyish. I 
stayed in till all the rest of my party had gone out, 
then, lying flat on my back, with my head to the land 
and perfectly motionless, abandoned myself to the 
cradling motion of the long ground-swells, trusting to 
a breeze which blew directly on shore to waft me 
gently thitherward. The breeze did as I expected. I 
drifted in very rapidly and so comfortably that I could 
have lain on my soft couch and slept all day. Pres- 
ently I put down my hand to turn over, intending to 
swim the rest of the way ashore face forward. My 
palm instantly touched bottom, and I found that I had 
floated so far land-ward that I was in water only six 
inches deep ! The fact that a craft of a full-grown 
man's draught of water no more touched bottom in a 
shoal like that than in mid-ocean, is the best illustra- 
tion I can give of the remarkable density and lifting 
power of the Salt Lake water. Glad to have been 
saved the greater part of my return journey through 
the dumping-ground of dead gallinippers, I scrambled 
to my feet, and picked my way over the daggery 
beach to the kitchen with no worse result than a heel- 
bruise. I had from hearsay some idea of the incrusta- 
tions of salt which appear on every bather in Salt Lake 
when he comes out, but was not at all prepared for the 



404 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

reality. The evaporation taking place while I walked 
the trifling distance across the beach to the house, 
was sufficient to turn me into a pillar of salt, or, as 
an old Mormon called it, to " Lotswificate " me. From 
head to foot, almost without a break, I was covered 
with a crystalline film, white as leprosy, and the thick- 
ness of ordinary stove-door isinglass. I had been a 
Nazarene ever since leaving New York ; and the effect 
of my long hair and full beard with the salt dried into 
them was very like that of the grasses which country 
ladies amuse themselves by vitrifying with saturated 
solutions of alum, giving me the appearance of a 
shaggy Triton wreathed with sea-weed and crystals. 
In the kitchen I found that very necessary conclusion 
to a Salt Lake swim, a wash-tub full of fresh water, 
and, jumping into that, divested myself of my acrid 
exuvice. The sensation of getting off the salt was 
very grateful, for, as I got drier, it made my skin feel 
absolutely thirsty like a tongue ; indeed, a smarting, 
burning sensation lingered in my pores to' a greater ^ 
or less degree all day ; and I could not help fancying 
that it made my fauces dry as well as my skin, pro- 
ducing by absorption an internal thirst corresponding 
to the outer one. This is not to be wondered at when 
we consider the great affinity of salt for the fluids of 
the body, the activity of all the absorbent surfaces in 
summer, and the intense brininess of the lake as re- 
vealed by the analyses made during Stansbury's ex- 
pedition. The brine of Salt Lake, in point of den- 
sity, has but one known superior on the globe — the 
waters of the Dead Sea. In a hundred parts by 
weight, the latter contain 24.580 of solid contents, 
and the former 22.422. The solid contents were con- 
stituted in the following proportions : — 



THE DEAD SEA. 405 

Chloride of sodium . . . . . .20.196 

Sulphate of soda 1.834 

Chloride of magnesium 0.252 

Chloride of calcium (a trace) and waste . . 0.140 

22.422 

(The specimen brought home by Captain Stansbury 
to be subjected to Dr. Gale's analysis was too small to 
be examined with reference to any other components 
than those here stated, and omits consideration of all 
gaseous matters held in solution by the Salt Lake 
waters, which are likely to be considerable, especially 
along the shore, where decay of organic bodies is con- 
stantly going on, and sulphide of hydrogen may natu- 
rally be looked for. Still, for all practical purpose, 
the analysis is abundantly precise.) 

The waters of the Dead Sea are much weaker in 
chloride of sodium, and much stronger in chloride of 
magnesium ; containing in their 24.580 of solid con- 
tents only 10.360 of the former, but 10.246 of the 
latter, while their chloride of calcium amounts to 
3.920 parts, and their sulphate of soda to 0.054. The 
Salina salt wells are the strongest in the States, and 
the maximum yield of their brine is about 17 J per 
cent, in solid salt. That of the Salt Lake brine is 
about 20 per cent. It will be seen that although the 
density of the Dead Sea water is about two per cent, 
greater, its per cent, of chloride of sodium is only 
about one half, and thus the waters of Salt Lake are 
by nearly three per cent, the strongest natural brine 
in the world. The Mormons avail themselves of it 
for domestic purposes by the crudest possible pro- 
cesses of manufacture, — or frequently without man- 
ufacture of any kind, — collecting it from the rocks, 
which it incrusts in large quantities, and bringing it 



406 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

to the city by cart-loads. I noticed that on Town- 
send's table it often seemed singularly damp, consid- 
ering the dry climate. Dr. Gale explains this fact 
by the presence of the chlorides of magnesium and 
calcium, both of which are very deliquescent, and in 
dissolving extend their deliquative action to the com- 
mon salt. In any but a new country, where people 
have enough to do without attending to the extreme 
refinements of domestic life, the lake salt would be 
refined, instead of used in its crude state, as it now so 
generally is. Dr. Gale's method for this purpose is 
beautifully simple and easy. It consists merely in 
pouring lake water, either just as it is bailed up or 
concentrated by boiling, upon a heap of the drying 
incrustations laid on a blanket or other porous bot- 
tom. This water being already a saturated solution 
of chloride of sodium, or nearly so, will dissolve little 
or none of that component, but takes up and leaches 
away all the other chlorides present. After repeating 
this process three or four times, and allowing the re- 
siduary mass to crystallize in the sun, the result is 
pure enough for all practical purposes. If absolute 
purity is desired, another filtration, this time fresh 
water at a temperature of 91|° F. being employed 
instead of salt, will remove the small per cent, of 
Glauber-salts still remaining, though its quantity is 
not sufficient, if left in the table salt, to produce any 
cathartic effect. 

The road which we had come is one of the emi- 
grant routes to California, leading from Salt Lake City 
round the northern promontory of the Oquirrh into 
the Tuilla Valley, past the range forming that val- 
ley's western wall, which smks to the level of the 
lake at a considerable distance from its shore, instead 



THE DEAD SEA. 407 

of dipping boldly into its waters like the Oquirrh or 
the Wahsatch, and leaves a broad plain for the pas- 
sage of the road further west, thence striking across 
the desert and the Humboldt Mountains to the Sierra 
Nevada, and climbing over the latter into the great 
Gold State of the Pacific. The other principal road, 
and the one which we took on leaving Salt Lake City 
for good, strikes southerly from the city up the valley 
-of the Jordan to Utah Lake and Camp Floyd (now 
"Fort Crittenden"), and traverses a more southerly 
portion of the Great Desert to California. The for- 
mer route is taken by many, indeed, by most of the 
emigrant trains, the pasturage and springs along its 
course being plentier and more excellent. On our 
way back to the city we encountered a long train of 
forty or fifty wagons drawn by mules and oxen, and 
followed by herds of milch cattle, oxen, and yearlings, 
and flocks of sheep. The drivers were a fine-looking 
set of men, unmistakably Scandinavian in their fea- 
tures, dress, and language ; muscular, well knit, large- 
framed, and bronzed by long exposure over the moun- 
tains and plains which they had travelled for twelve 
hundred miles between the Missouri and Mormon- 
dom. The women were apparently a better grade than 
those who visit Salt Lake from Sweden without going 
further, and sat knitting, singing, and tending their 
babies as if they had not spurned the gospel offers, 
and were not now, with every tiu-n of their heavy 
wagon-tires, putting further behind them the invita- 
tion to stay and go to heaven with a fractional hus- 
band. Everybody looked contented except the poor 
draught animals, who lolled painfully, their big plead- 
ing eyes telling of a thirst which could be but poorly 
slaked at the scanty and brackish springs where they 



408 THE HEART OF THE COKTINENT. 

stopped just as we met them, and which would be 
only intensified as they proceeded over the broad 
desert area between here and the Humboldt. I felt 
thirsty myself, and got out of our wagon to drink at 
the well where the herdsmen were supplying their 
need. The water was a warm, nauseous solution of 
minerals, which betrayed the existence of sulphur in 
the soil as well as the near neighborhood of the lake. 
I drank as much of it as I could, hoping that it would" 
moisten my throat sufficiently to last till I could get 
a draught from the city conduits ; but its effect was 
only to sicken even my far from fastidious stomach, 
and increase my thirst to such a miserable degree 
that Townsend's was doubly welcome when we ar- 
rived shortly after sundown. The effect of the snow 
lying in the lofty valleys between the mountain-tops 
of the Wahsatch and the pure red lustre of the Wah- 
satch itself, in the twilight reflections from the bril- 
liant heaven over the Oquirrh, behind Avhich the sun 
had just gone down, was a sight of such magical 
beauty as no pen or brush can hope to paint, no heart 
which it has filled with ecstasy can ever forget. Nine 
thousand feet above the Jordan, twelve thousand 
above the sea, inaccessible in many places to any 
climbing, and accessible nowhere short of forty or 
fifty miles' difficult, devious, and dangerous climb, — 
those spotless abysses of pearl and rose-tinted opal, 
of marble and clear ouyx, contrasted with vast masses 
of bare mountain that were all one auroral blush, 
looked to our enamored eyes like part of the heaven 
itself — the very gates and foundations of the city of 
God. 



CHAPTER IX. 

SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 

It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. 
To a traveller paying his first visit it has the interest 
of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws 
which govern the rest of the world. There is no 
snow there. There are no summer showers. The 
tailor recognizes no aphelion or perihelion in his 
custom : the thin woolen suit which his patron had 
made in April is comfortably worn until April again. 
The only change of stockings there is from wet to 
dry, or from soiled to clean. Save that in so-called 
winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless in- 
tervals of amber weather, and that soi-disant summer 
is one entire amber mass, its unbroken divine days 
concrete in it, there is no inequality on which to for- 
bid the bans between May and December. In San 
Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of 
Nature : the wealth of that great dramatist, the year, 
resulting in the same manner as the poverty of dab- 
blers in private theatricals, — a single flat doing ser- 
vice for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose 
of notes of hand, the almanac of San Francisco might 
replace its mutable months and seasons with one great 
kindly, constant, sumptuous All the Year Round. 

Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits 
are produced ! Fruit enough metaphorical : for the 
scientific man or artist who cannot make hay while 



410 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

such a sun shines from April to November must be a 
slothful laborer indeed. But fruit also literal : for 
what joy of vegetation is lacking to the man who 
every month in the year can look through his study- 
window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and 
cream for his breakfast, — who can sit down to this 
royal fruit, and at the same time to apricots, peaches, 
nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons, figs both 
yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three 
kinds ? 

Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Oc- 
cidental Hotel. Its comfort is like that of a royal 
home. There is nothing inn-ish about it. Remember- 
ing the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained 
to say that I have never, even in New York, seen its 
equal for elegance of appointment, attentiveness of 
servants, or excellence of cuisine. Having come to 
this extreme of civilization from the extreme of bar- 
barism, we found that it actually needed an exertion 
to leap from the lap of luxury, after a fortnight's 
pleasaunce, and take to the woods again in flannel 
and corduroys. 

But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the 
heavenly climate, the paradisaical fruits, and the royal 
hotel of San Francisco, were the old friends whom we 
found, and the new ones we made there. With but 
one exception (and that an express-company, not a 
man), we were received by all our San Francisco ac- 
quaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a wel- 
come and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was 
honorable to them. Need I say whose brotherly 
hands were among the very first outstretched to us, 
in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by 
whose radiant face and golden speech we were most 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 411 

lovingly detained evening after evening and far into 
the night ? A few days after our return to the East, 
when we read that dreadful message, " Statr King is 
dead," the lightning that carried it seemed to end in 
our hearts. We withered under it; California had 
lost its soul for us ; at noon or in dreams that balmy 
land would nevermore be the paradise it once was to 
us. The last hand that pressed our own, when we 
sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the 
same that had been first to give us our California 
welcome. Just before the lines were cast off, Starr 
King stood at the door of our state-room, and said, — 

" I could not bear to have you go away without one 
more good-by. Here are the cartes-de-visite I prom- 
ised. They look hard-worked, but they look like me. 
Good-by ! God bless you ! I hope to make a visit to 
the East next summer, and then we will get together 
somewhere by the sea. Good-by ! " 

He went down the ladder. When the steamer 
glided off, his bright face sent benedictions after us 
as far as we could see ; and then, for the last time on 
earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded 
from our sight, — but, ! never from our hearts, 
either in the here or the hereafter. " We shall see 
him, but not now." We shall be together with him 
" in the summer by the sea ; " but that summer shall 
have other glory than the sun to lighten it, and the 
sea shall be of crystal. 

King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. 
We little knew that we were losing, for this world, 
our last opportunity of close daily intercourse with 
his sweet spirit, though we were grievously disap- 
pointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting 
out, that work for the nation must detain him in San 
Francisco, after all. 



412 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

If report was true, we were going to the original 
site of the Garden of Eden, — into a region which 
out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the valley 
of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and 
the Himmaryeh in its precipices. As for the two 
former subjects of comparison, we never met any 
tourist who could adjust the question from his own 
experience ; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to 
the Alpine cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt 
by repeated judgments; and a couple of English offi- 
cers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh scen- 
ery told Starr King that there was no precipice in 
Asia to be compared for height or grandeur with Tu- 
toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack. 

We were going into the vale whose giant domes 
and battlements had months before thrown their pho- 
tographic shadow through Watkins's camera across 
the mysterious wide Continent, causing exclamations 
of awe at Goupil's window, and ecstasy in Dr. 
Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in Starr 
King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the 
hour already, — I, let me confess it, half a Thomas-a 
Didymus to Nature, unwilling to believe the utmost 
true of her till I could put my finger in her very 
prints. . Now we were going to test her reported lar- 
gess for ourselves. 

No Saratoga affair, this ! A total lack of tall trunks, 
frills, and curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a 
Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the San Francisco belle for- 
sakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on") 
her back hair, abandons her capillary " waterfalls " 
for those of the Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old 
lady, who had her whole osseous system removed by 
the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her " skele- 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 413 

ton " behind her. The bachelor who cares to see un- 
hooped womanhood once more before he dies, should 
go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three or four 
times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp 
there, — though the trip is one which might well cost 
a feeble woman her life. 

Our male preparations were of the most pioneer 
description. One wintry day since my return I was 
riding in a train on the New York Central, when an 
undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed 
with the sale of beeves, accosted me with the ques- 
tion, " Friend, yeou've travelled consid'able, and be- 
lieve in the religion of Natur', don't ye ? " "Why 
so ? " I responded. " Them loots,'' replied my new 
acquaintance, pointing at a pair with high knee-caps, 
like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite. Other- 
wise, we took the oldest clothes we had, — and it is 
not difiicult to find that variety in the trunk of a re- 
cent Overland stager. We were armed with Ballard 
rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had come 
with us across the Continent ; our ammunition we got 
in San Francisco, together with all such commissa- 
riat luxuries as were worth transportation : our ne- 
cessaries we left to be purchased at that jumping-off 
place of civiHzation, Mariposa, whence we were to 
start our pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me 
recommend tourists like ourselves to include in the 
former catalogue plenty of canned fruits, sardines, 
and apple-butter, — in the latter, a jug of sirup for 
the inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will 
presently appear inojur narrative, can tell when a 
slapjack may be tEie last plank between him and 
starvation ; and to this plank how powerfully sirup 
enables him to stick ! 



414 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

The only portion of our outfit which would have 
pleased an exquisite (and he must be rather of the 
Count Devereux than the Foppington Flutter school) 
was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really 
good saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attain- 
able in California. Everybody rides there ; if you 
wish to create a sensation with your horsemanship in 
the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not 
well : everybody does this last. Even since the horse- 
railroad has begun to clutter Montgomery Street (the 
San Franciscan Boulevards) with its cars, it is a daily 
matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging 
through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if re- 
peated in Broadway by Henry G. Stebbins, would cost 
him his reputation on 'Change and his seat in Con- 
gress. The nation of beggars on horseback which 
first colonized California has left behind it many tra- 
ditions unworthy of conservation, and multitudinous 
fleas not at all traditional, but even less keep worthy; 
but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and mixed 
breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horseman- 
ship so firmly in the country that even street-rail- 
roads cannot uproot it, and that Americans who never 
sat even so little as an Atlantic State's pony, on com- 
ing here presently take to the saddle with all their 
hearts. In most of the smaller California towns, a 
very serviceable half or quarter-breed saddle-horse is 
to be had for forty dollars, — the "breed" portion of 
his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the 
remaining fraction being native or Mustang stock. 
This animal, if need be, will live on road-side crop- 
pings nearly as well as a mule, — travel all day long 
on an easy " lope," never offering to stop till fatigue 
makes him fall, — and, if you let him, will take you 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 415 

through chaparrals, and up and down precipices at 
whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would break 
his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious 
mounts, supplied itself, after a tour through the San 
Francisco stables, with saddle-animals at an average 
of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in gold, then 
amounted to one hundred dollars in notes ; but the 
New York market could not have furnished us with 
such horses for three hundred dollars. 

It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should 
never get started, but I must linger a moment to do 
justice to our accoutrements. If there be a more 
perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare- 
back a good way to get it. Anything more unlike the 
slippery little pad on which we of the East amble 
about parks and suburban roads cannot be imagined. 
It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who 
spend nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is 
as scientifically fitted to the rider's form as an old 
" incroyables " pair of pantaloons. There is no such 
thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower 
lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating 
gracefully in a broad-topped pommel, it enables one 
to lean back in descending, forward in climbing, the 
great ridges on the path of California travel, — thus 
affording capital relief both to one's self and one's 
horse, and bringing in both from a fifty miles' march 
comparatively unjaded. 

The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, 
shaped nearly like an Omega upside-down (xj), left 
unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable foot- 
ing, covered with a half-shoe of the stoutest leather, 
which renders it impossible for the toe to slip through 
or the ankle to foul under any circumstances. At- 



416 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

tached to the straps from which these swing is a wide 
and neatly ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectu- 
ally prevents the grazing of the rider's leg. The sur- 
cingle, or, Calif ornic^, the cinch, is a broad strip of hair- 
cloth with a padded ring at either end, through 
which you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout 
straps sewed to other rings under the saddle flaps. 
This arrangement is not only far securer than our 
Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the 
tightness of your girth much more delicately, and 
make a far snugger fit. 

The only particular in which I could not commend 
and adopt the native practice was the Mexican bit. 
It is a dreadful instrument of torture, putting im- 
mense leverage in the rider's hands, and enabling him 
at will to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces ; in- 
deed, the horse on which it is used is guided entirely 
by pressure on the opposite side of the neck from that 
in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of 
drawing his head around would so lift the bit as to 
drive him frantic. There are very few horses of any 
breed, even the mustang, that never stumble ; and as 
I prefer lifting my horse to letting him break his 
knees or neck, I want a bridle I can pull upon with- 
out tearing his mouth. So, in spite of its handsome 
appearance and the very manageable single white 
cord into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed 
the Mexican head-gear, and took the ordinary Eastern 
snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed our ac- 
coutrement, — whips being here unknown. 

I may as well make a word-map of our route be- 
fore going farther. Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship 
themselves and their horses from San Francisco by 
steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Jo- 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 417 

aquin, the most northerly of a series of rivers fed di- 
rectly from the Sierra Nevada water-shed, — a series, 
indeed, continued through much of the still lower 
Pacific coast to the Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sac- 
ramento drains quite a different region, that of the 
broad plains between the Sierra and the Coast range, 
occupying the northern portion of the State, — re- 
sembling in its physical features, much more than 
any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated 
trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. 
The Colorado is almost the only other large river cre- 
ated from many tributaries, which debouches between 
the Columbia and the Isthmus, — and that rises east 
of the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. 
The Yo-Semite Valley is one of the cradles through 
which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach the 
ocean ; its threading stream is the Merced ; and if 
on any good United States Survey map you will 
please to follow that river back to the mountains, 
when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be 
(or would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the 
Great Yo-Semite. You will then see that our course 
led us across three streams, after leaving the San Jo- 
aquin at Stockton en route for Mariposa, — the Stanis- 
laus, the Tuolomne, and the main Merced. The dis- 
tance from Stockton to Mariposa is about one hun- 
dred miles, a small part of the way between fenced 
ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling 
plains, somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced 
between the two great ranges of the State. Here 
and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small 
settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, 
and thrice you come to a hybrid town, with a Span- 
ish plaza, and Yankee notions sold around it. We 

27 



418 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to 
Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, 
" peep, and botanize;" besides, we were dragging with 
us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in Stockton, 
in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should 
get our extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which 
we had harnessed for their first time an implacable 
white mule with an incapable white horse, to neither 
of which each other's society or their own new trade 
was congenial. 

I shall not linger here as we did there. To an or- 
nithologist the whole road is interesting, — especially 
to one making a specialty of owls. The only game 
within easy reach is the dove and the California 
ground-squirrel, — a big fellow, much like our North- 
eastern gray, barring the former's subterranean hab- 
its. On the plains threaded by the road the pasture 
is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, 
when the great herds which usually feed at large on 
and between the river bottoms are driven to the rich 
green grass in the high valleys of the Sierra, — or 
ought to be : many cattle die along the San Joaquin 
every summer for want of this care. Occasionally 
the road winds through the refreshing shadow of a 
grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water on a 
sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the 
oak family that I ever beheld were growing on the 
banks of the Tuolomne River, where we forded it at 
Koberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension 
superior to the finest white-oaks of the East, but sur- 
passed in beauty every tradition of their genus. 
Their vast gnarled branches followed as exquisite 
curves as belong to any elm on a New England 
meadow, and wept at the extremities like those of 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 419 

that else matchless tree, — possessing, moreover, a 
sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal emhon- 
pmit, unknown to their graceful sister of our low- 
lands. 

At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we 
completed our cavalcade of pack-animals, transferred 
our wagon-load to their backs (the average mule- 
pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three 
hundred pounds), roped it there in the most ap- 
proved muletero fashion, and started into the wilder- 
ness. 

Let us call the roll. Beside the three gentlemen 
who with myself had formed the original Overland 
party, we numbered two young artists of great merit 
then sojourning for a short time in California, — Wil- 
liams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Diissel- 
dorf friend, — also a highly scientific metallurgist 
and physicist generally. Dr. John Hewston of San 
Francisco. 

To serve the party, we secured a man and a boy. 
Regarding the former, perhaps the more truthful 
assertion would be that he secured us ; for, as will 
shortly appear, though we bought his services, he 
sold us in return. We picked him up in a San Fran- 
cisco employment office, after looking all over the 
city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and find- 
ing that in a scarce-labor country like California even 
fifty gold dollars per month, with keep and expenses, 
were no sufficient bait for the catch we wanted. He 
was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair, service- 
able-looking hands, and no end to self-recommenda- 
tions ; but then it was impossible to ask after hi n at 
his '-last place," that having been General Johnston's 
camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of 



420 THE HEART OF THE CONTHSTENT. 

Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew 
that soup-meat went into cold water, we rushed 
blindly into an engagement with him, marriage-ser- 
vice fashion, and took him for better or worse. The 
thing which I think finally " fired our Northern 
hearts " and clinched the matter was his assertion of 
nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance, whose 
name he bore, combined with unswerving personal 
loyalty. Lest by some future D'Israeli this be writ- 
ten down among the traditional greennesses of learned 
men, let me say that he was our pis-aller, — we find- 
ing ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, 
with nobody to help pack our mules or care for them 
and the horses. 

The boy we obtained near Mariposa. He was an 
independent squire to the man of whom we got the 
extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of 
trustee and prochdn amy to an orphan family of mules. 
At fifteen years and in jackets, he was one of the 
keenest speculators in fire-arms I ever saw; could 
swap horses or play poker with anybody ; and, take 
him all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall 
never look upon his like again. 

Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five 
pack-beasts by as many tow-lines, we struck up into 
the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills, commencing our 
climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole 
distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve 
of these we pursued a road in some degree practica- 
ble to carts, and leading to one of those inevitable 
steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his 
first swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing 
the saw-mill in the very act of astonishing the wil- 
derness with a dinner- whistle, we struck a trail and 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 421 

fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was 
almost a continuous alternation of descent and climb 
over outlying ridges of the Sierra. Our raw-recruited 
mules, and the elementary condition of our intellects 
in the science of professional packing, spun out this 
portion of our journey to three days, — though al- 
lowance is to be made for the fact of our stopping 
at noon of the second day and not resuming our 
trail till the morning of the third. This interim we 
spent in visiting the Big Trees, which are situated 
four or five miles off the Yo-Semite track. 

" Clark's," where tourists stop for this purpose, is 
just half-way between Mariposa and the great Valley. 
'' Clark " himself is one of the best-informed men, one 
of the very best guides, I ever met in the Califor- 
nian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, 
stalwart old grizzly-hunter and miner of the '49 days, 
wears a noble full beard hued like his favorite game, 
but no head-covering of any kind since recovered 
from a fever which left his head intolerant of even 
a slouch. He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in 
the winter, and in summer occupies a hermitage 
built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty valleys 
of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise 
by the nicest poached eggs and rashers of bacon, 
home-made bread and wild-strawberry sweetmeats, 
which they will find in the State. 

Before reaching Clark's, we had been astonished at 
the dimensions of the ordinary pines and firs, — our 
trail for miles at a time running through forests 
where trees one hundred and fifty feet high wrre 
very common, and trees of two hundred feet by no 
means rare, while some of the very largest must 
have considerably surpassed the latter measurement. 



422 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big 
Trees proper, as thoroughly as themselves would 
have dwarfed a common Green Mountain forest. I 
find no one on this side the Continent who believes 
the literal truth which travellers tell about these 
marvelous giants. People sometimes think they do, 
but that is only because they fail to realize the prop- 
osition. They have no concrete idea of how the 
asserted proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any 
other man at home with the look of dimensions, what 
you have seen in the Mariposa County groves, and 
his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely 
confess, that, though I always thought I had believed 
travellers in their recitals on this subject, when I saw 
the trees I found I had bargained to credit no such 
story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful 
toward the friends who had cheated me of my faith 
under a misapprehension. 

Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one 
hundred and thirty-two trees which have been meas- 
ured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in circum- 
ference ; five range between thirty-two and thirty- 
six feet; fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; 
thirty-four between fifty and sixty ; fourteen between 
sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and 
eighty ; two between eighty and ninety ; two be- 
tween ninety and one hundred ; two are just one 
hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This 
last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of 
four hundred feet. I found a rough ladder laid 
against its trunk, — for it is prostrate, — and climbed 
upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark. I 
mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt, and there 
made the measurement which ascertained its diam- 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GKEAT YO-SEMITE. 423 

eter as thirty-four feet, — its circumference one hun- 
dred and two feet plus a fraction. Of course the 
thickness of its bark is various ; but I cut off some of 
it to a foot in depth, and there was evidently plenty 
more below that. 

To make some rough attempt at a conception of 
what these figures amount to, suppose the tree fallen 
at the gable of an ordinary two-story house. You 
propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to 
the upper side of the tree. That plank would per- 
ceptibly slope up from your roof-peak. Through 
another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from 
end to end, our whole cavalcade charged at the full 
trot for a distance of one hundred and fifty feet. The 
entire length of this tree before truncation had been 
about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow 
bases of trees still standing we easily sheltered our- 
selves and horses. We tried throwing to the top of 
some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and finally 
came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster 
not included in the above table of dimensions, as most 
of those measured are still living, and all have the 
bark upon them still, while the tree is to some extent 
barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live 
wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter, — over 
one hundred and twenty in circumference ! Esti- 
mates, grounded on the well-known principle of 
yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the 
birth of these largest giants as far as 1200 b. c. Thus 
their tender saplings were running up just as the 
gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some of them 
had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter 
Oak when Solomon called his master-masons to re- 
freshment from the building of the Temple. We 



424 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

cannot realize time-images as we can those of space 
by a reference to dimensions within experience, so 
that the age of these marvelous trees still remains 
to me an incomprehensible fact, though with my 
mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy 
they look, and how dwarfed is the man who leans 
against them. We lingered among them half a day, 
the artists making color-studies of the most pictur- 
esque, the rest of us izing away at something scien- 
tific, — Botany, Entomology, or Statistics. In Geol- 
ogy and Mineralogy there is nothing to do here or 
in the Valley, — the formation all being typical 
Sierra Nevada granite, with no specimens to keep or 
problems to solve. Of course our artists neither made 
nor expected to make anything like a realizing pic- 
ture of the groves. The marvelous of size does not 
go into gilt frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it 
only looks like a common tree in a cramped coffin. 
To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt 
for comparison ; but, unless you take a canvas of 
the size of Haydon's, your picture is quite as likely 
to resemble Homunculus against an average timber- 
tree as a large man against Sequoia gigantea. What 
our artists did was to get a capital transcript of 
the Big Trees' color, — a beautifully bright cinna- 
mon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety to the forest, 
" making sunshine in the shady place ; " also, their 
typical figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and 
branchless trunk, crowned almost at the summit by 
a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy 
fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce 
larger than a plover's Qgg. Perhaps the best idea of 
their figure may be obtained by fancying an Italian 
stone-pine grown out of recollection. 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 425 

Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, 
silvery streams leaped down intensely cold through 
the granite chasms, — all of them fed from the snow- 
peaks, and charmingly picturesque, — most of them 
good trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a 
throw ; and now, on leaving Clark's, we crossed the 
largest of these, a fork of the Merced which flows 
through this valley. For twelve miles further a series 
of tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the 
utmost, but brought us quite apropos at dinner-time 
to a lovely green meadow walled in on one side by 
near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it 
speedily furnished us with frogs enough for an eiitree. 
Between two and three in the afternoon we set out 
upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were now 
nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty preci- 
pices which wall the Yo-Semite Valley, and for two 
hours longer found the trail easy, save where it 
crossed the bogs of summit-level springs. 

Immediately after leaving the meadow where we 
dined, we plunged again into the thick forest, where 
every now and then some splendid grouse or the 
beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whir- 
ring away from before our horses. Here and there 
a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our trail. The tall 
purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of 
name unknown to me, and another blossom like the 
laburnum, endlessly varied in its shades of roseate, 
blue, or the compromised tints, made the hill-sides 
gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were 
scentless; but one other flower, much rarer, made 
fragrance enough for all. This was the " Lady Wash- 
ington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with 
an odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding 



426 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

hid us from the fact of our approach to the Valley's 
tremendous battlement, till our trail turned at a 
sharp angle, and we stood on " Inspiration Point." 

That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it 
only the spontaneous expression of our own feelings 
on the spot. We did not so much seem to be seeing 
from that crag; of vision a new scene on the old fa- 
miliar globe, as a new heaven and a new earth into 
which the creative spirit had just been breathed. I 
hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my 
vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for 
an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature. 

We stood on the verge of a precipice more than 
three thousand feet in height, — a sheer granite wall, 
whose terrible perpendicular distance baffled all vis- 
ual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy 
green spicidce, — they might be tender spears of grass 
catching J the slant sun on upheld aprons of cobweb, 
or giant pines whose tops that sun first gilt before he 
made gold of all the Valley. 

There faced us another wall like our own. How 
far off* it might be we could only guess. When Na- 
ture's lightning hits a man fair and square, it splits 
his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, math- 
ematicians have ascertained the width of the Valley 
to vary between half a mile and five miles. Where 
we stood, the width is about two. 

I said a wall like our own ; but as yet we could not 
know that certainly, for of our own we saw nothing. 
Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the tremendous pre- 
cipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in aU 
the serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh, 
— broadly burning, rather than glistening, in the 
white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From that 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 427 

sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of pur- 
ple twilight flushing the eastern sky- rim — yes, as if 
it were the very butment of the eternally blue Cali- 
fornian heaven — ran that wall, always sheer as the 
plummet, without a visible break through which 
squirrel might climb or sparrow fly, — so broad that it 
was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by 
the loftiest waterfall in the world, — so lofty that its 
very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty 
pines and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge 
seemed like mere lashes on the granite lid of the Great 
Valley's upgazing eye. In the first astonishment of 
the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, 
and seemed to see an unbroken sky-line ; but as ec- 
stasy gave way to examination, we discovered how 
greatly some portions of the precipice surpassed our 
immediate vis-d-vis in height. 

First, a little east of our ofi-look, there projected 
boldly into the Valley from the dominant line of the 
base a square stupendous tower that might have been 
hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second 
Babel experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Al- 
lah. Here and there the tools had left a faint scratch, 
only deep as the width of Broadway and a bagatelle 
of five hundred feet in length ; but that detracted no 
more from the unblemished foursquare contour of the 
entire mass than a pin-mark from the symmetry of a 
door-post. A city might have been built on its grand 
flat top. And ! the gorgeous masses of light and 
shadow which the falling sun cast on it, — the shad- 
ows like great waves, the lights like their spumy tops 
and flying mist, thrown up from the heaving breast 
of a golden sea ! In California, at this season, the 
dome of heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of 



428 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

what must be done for the bringing out of Tu-toch- 
anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken win- 
ter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his preci- 
pice is nearly four thousand feet perpendicular ; his 
name is supposed to be that of the Valley's tutelar 
deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish alias, — some 
Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "^/ 
Capitan " the idea of divine authority implied in Tu- 
toch-anula. 

Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose high 
above the rest of the sky-line, and nearly five thou- 
sand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere of granite, 
capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or 
shrub to hide its vast proportions. This we imme- 
diately recognized as the famous To-coy-a6, better 
known through Watkins's photographs as the Great 
North Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the 
former name, but the latter is certainly appropriate. 
Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose 
here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but 
its sky-line is far more regular than that of the south- 
ern side, where we were standing. 

We drew close to the edge of the precipice and 
looked along over our own wall up the Valley. Its 
contour was a rough curve from our stand-point to a 
station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley 
dwindles to its least width, so that all the interme- 
diate crests and pinnacles which topped the perpen- 
dicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of 
a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. 
There is the same plumb-line uprightness in these 
mighty precipices as in those of the opposite side ; 
but their front is much more broken by bold prom- 
ontories, and their tabular tops, instead of lying hori- 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 429 

zontal, slope up at an angle of forty-five degrees or 
more from the spot where we were standing, and 
make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose 
upper edges are between three and four thousand 
feet in height. But the glory of this southern wall 
comes at the termination of our view opposite the 
North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height 
of nearly one sheer mile with a parabolic sky-line, 
and its posterior surface is as elegantly rounded as 
an acorn cup. From this contour results a naked 
semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover 
one of our smaller Eastern counties, though its ex- 
quisite proportions make it seem a thing to hold in 
the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered glacis 
of detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that 
is bare of all life save the palaeozoic memories which 
have wrinkled the granite Colossus from the earliest 
seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a Yo- 
Semite crag inorganic, as I used to speak of everything 
not strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the 
Great South Dome that utterance became blasphe- 
mous. Not living was it ? Who knew but the debris 
at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and exuvice of 
a stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital 
changes which were going on within its gritty cellular 
tissue were only imperceptible to us because silent 
and vastly secular ? What was he who stood up be- 
fore Tis-sa-ack, and said, " Thou art dead rock ! " save 
a momentary sojourner in the bosom of a cyclic pe- 
riod whose clock his race had never yet lived long 
enough to hear strike ? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack him- 
self were but one of the atoms in a grand organism 
where we could see only by monads at a time, — if 
he, and the sun, and the sea were but cells or organs 



430 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of some one small being in the fenceless vivarium of 
the Universe ? Let not the ephemeron that lights on 
a baby's hand generalize too rashly upon the non- 
growing of organisms ! As we thought on these 
things, we bared our heads to the barer forehead of 
Tis-sarack. 

I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the 
masculine gender, but the native tradition makes it 
feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful Indian 
legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it 
into a few short sentences from the long report of an 
old Yo-Semite brave. Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar god- 
dess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was its fostering 
god, — the former a radiant maiden, the latter an 
ever-young immortal, — 

" amorous as the month of May." 

Becoming desperately fascinated jvith his fair col- 
league, Tu-toch-anula spent in her arms all the divine 
long days of the California summer, kissing, dallying, 
and lingering, until the Valley tribes began to starve 
for lack of the crops which his supervision should 
have ripened, and a deputation of venerable men 
came from the dying people to prostrate themselves 
at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her na- 
tion's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried 
for succor to the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible 
noise of thunder, the mighty cone split from heaven 
to earth, — its frontal half falling down to dam the 
snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the 
beautiful Valley stream takes one of its loveliest 
branches, — its other segment remaining erect till 
this present, to be the Great South Dome under the 
in memoriam title of Tis-sarack. But the divine maiden 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 431 

who died to save her people appeared on earth no 
more, and in his agony Tu-toch-anula carved her 
image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he had 
carved his own on the surface of El Capitan, — where 
a lively faith and good glasses may make out the efiS.- 
gies unto this day. 

Sometimes these Indian traditions, being trans- 
lated according to the doctrine of correspondences, 
are of great use to the scientific man, — in the pres- 
ent instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geo- 
logical fact, and the reason of a water-course which 
else might become obscured by time. You may lose 
a rough fact because everybody is handling it and 
passing it around with the sense of a liberty to pre- 
sent it next in his own way ; but a fact with its facets 
cut — otherwise a poem — is unchangeable, imperdi- 
table. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody 
tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded 
subject to liberal translation ; poems circulate virgin 
and verbatim. In another chapter I may recur to this 
topic with reference to the Columbia River, and the 
capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap- 
rock by the lantern of Indian legend. 

Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the 
Valley itself, as seen from this great altitude. There 
lies a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by 
the slant-beamed sun, — chrysoprase beautiful enough 
to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's 
apocalyptic heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, 
it narrows to a little strait of green between the hut- 
ments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the west- 
ward, widening more and more, it opens into the 
bosom of great mountain-ranges, — into a field of per- 
fect light, misty by its own excess, — into an unspeak-' 



432 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

able suffusion of glory created from the phoenix-pile 
of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as 
some rich old clover -mead; yonder, its luxuriant 
smooth grasses give way to a dense wood of cedars, 
oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man 
or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost par- 
adise ; but for ourselves, standing at the precipice, 
petrified, as it were, rock on rock, the great world 
might well be running back in stone -and -grassy 
dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet 
but two daughters, the crag and the clover. We 
were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's self- 
examination. What if, on considering herself, she 
should of a sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine 
to begin the throes of a new cycle, — spout up re- 
morseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, 
and hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her 
unbosomed sins ? Earth below was as motionless as 
the ancient heavens above, save for the shining ser- 
pent of the Merced, which silently to our ears 
threaded the middle of the grass, and twinkled his 
burnished back in the sunset wherever for a space he 
glided out of the shadow of woods. 

To behold this Promised Land proved quite a dif- 
ferent thing from possessing it. Only the silleros of 
the Andes, our mules, horses, and selves, can under- 
stand how much like a nightmare of endless roof- 
walking was the descent down the face of the preci- 
pice. A painful and most circuitous dug-way, where 
our animals had constantly to stop, lest their impetus 
should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps 
where the mere thought of a side-fall was terror, 
brought us in the twilight to a green meadow, ringed 
by woods, on the banks of the Merced. 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 433 

Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp, — call- 
ing it "Camp Rattlesnake," after a pestilent little 
beast of that tribe which insinuated itself into my 
blankets, but was disposed of by my artist comrade 
before it had inflicted its fatal wound upon me. Re- 
moving our packs and saddles, we dismissed their 
weary bearers to the deep green meadow, with no 
farther qualification to their license than might be 
found in ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep- 
driven pickets. We soon got together dead wood 
and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring fire, — 
made a kitchen table by wedging logs between the 
trunks of a three-forked tree, and thatching these 
with smaller sticks, — selected a cedar-canopied piece 
of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and as 
high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant hal- 
dacckini for the mattresses. I need not praise to any 
woodsman the quality of a sleep on evergreen-strew- 
ings. 

During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us 
made it our practice to rise with the dawn, and, im- 
mediately after a bath in the ice-cold Merced, take a 
breakfast which might sometimes fail in the game- 
department, but was an invariable success, considered 
as slapjacks and cofiee. Then the loyal nephew of 
the Secesh Governor and the testamentary guardian 
of the orphan mules brought our horses up* from 
picket ; then the artists with their camp-stools and 
color-boxes, the sages with their goggles, nets, botany- 
boxes, and bug-holders, the gentlemen of elegant leis- 
ure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a gun, all 
rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian 
shots of injunction about the dumpling in the grouse^ 
fricassee. 



434 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after 
sunrise our artists began labor in that only method 
which can ever make a true painter or a living land- 
scape, — color-studies on the spot ; and though I can 
not here speak of their results, I will assert that dur- 
ing their seven weeks' camp in the Valley they 
learned more and gained greater material for future 
triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives be- 
fore at the feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile 
the other two vaguely divided orders of gentlemen 
and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or 
the pool with various success for our next day's din- 
ner, or hunting specimens of all kinds, — Agassizing, 
so to speak. 

I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet ex- 
tensive class of sportsmen with whom fishing means 
nothing but catching fish. To that select minority 
of illuminati who go trouting for intellectual culture, 
because they cannot hear Booth or a sonata of Bee- 
thoven's. — who write rhapsodies of much fire and 
many pages on the divine superiority of the curve 
of an hyperbola over that of a parabola in the cast 
of a fly, — who call three little troutlings "« splendid 
dag's sport, me hog ! " because those rash and ill-ad- 
vised infants have been deceived by a feather-bug 
which never would have been of any use to them, 
instead of a real worm which would — let me say 
that we, who can make prettier curves and deceive 
larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go 
to the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I 
found that the best bait or fly caught only half a 
dozen trout in an afternoon, — and those the dull, 
black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots, 
— I gave over bothering the unambitious burghers 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 435 

of the flood with invitations to a rise in life, and took 
to the meadows with a butterfly-net. 

My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) 
should chase the butterfly on horseback. You are 
liable to put your net over your horse's head instead 
of the butterfly's. The butterfly keeps rather ahead 
of the horse. You may throw your horse when you 
mean to throw the net. The idea is a romantic one ; 
it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when 
court butterflies were said to have been netted from 
the saddle, — but it carries you nowhere else in par- 
ticular, unless perhaps into a small branch of the 
Merced, where you don't want to go. Then, too, if 
you slip down and leave your horse standing while 
you steal on a giant Papilio which is sucking the 
deer-weed in such a sweet spot for a cast, your horse 
(perhaps he has heard of the French general who 
said, "Asses and savans to the centre!") may dis- 
cover that he also is a sage, and retire to botanize 
while you are butterflying, — a contingency which 
entails your wading the Merced after him five several 
times, and finally going back to camp in wet disgust 
to procure another horse and a lariat. An experience 
faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon con- 
vinced me that the great arm of the service in but- 
terfly warfare is infantry. After I had turned myself 
into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to success. 
Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of 
its groves and meadows is sucked by some of the 
largest, the most magnificent, and most widely varied 
butterflies in the world. 

At noon those of us who came back to camp had a 
substantial dinner out of our abundant stores, rein- 
forced occasionally with grouse, quail, or pigeons, 



436 THE HEART OP THE CONTINENT. 

contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly 
dined h h foiirchette, \n their workshop, — something 
in a pail being carried out to them at noon by our 
Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness, 
and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which 
invariably carried the lunch ; so we used to call the 
boy, when we saw him coming, " Death on the Pail- 
horse." At evening, when the artists returned, half 
an hour was passed in a "private view" of their day's 
studies ; then came another dinner, called a supper ; 
then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and 
brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the 
genial way to bed- time. 

In his charming "Peculiar," Epes Sargent has 
given us an episode called the " Story of Estelle." 
It is the greatest of compliments to him that I could 
get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore 
the name of one of the most audacious and picaresque 
mortals I ever knew, — our hired man, who sold us — 
our — But hear my episode : it is 

THE STORY OF VANCE. 

Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with 
the Secesh uncle. I will be brief Our stores began 
to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a 
horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of pur- 
chases, and eighty golden dollars, bidding him good- 
speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was to return 
laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, 
and oil, on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. 
Seven days glided by, and the material for more slap- 
jacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our bag- 
bottoms. 

One morning I determined to save the party from 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 437 

starvation, and with a fresh supply of the currency 
set out for Mariposa. At Clark's I learned that our 
man had camped there about noon on the day he 
left us, turned his horse and mule loose, instead of 
picketing them, and spent the rest of the sunlight in 
a siesta. When he arose, his animals were undiscov- 
erable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse 
to go in search of them, and the generous hermit had 
not seen him since. 

Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I re- 
sumed my way toward the settlements. Coming by 
the steam saw-mill, I recognized Vance's steed graz- 
ing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, 
and led him in triumph to Mariposa, There I arrived 
at eight in the evening of the day I left the Valley, — 
having performed fifty miles of the hardest mountain 
trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve 
hours, making allowance for our halt and noon-feed 
at Clark's. If ever a California horse was tried, it 
was mine on that occasion ; and he came into Mari- 
posa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled 
or jaded in the least. 

Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory 
had carried him home to his old stable, — also the re- 
maining events in Vance's brief, but brilliant career. 
That ornament of the Utah and Yo-Semite expedi- 
tions had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse, — lost 
our eighty golden dollars at a single session of bluff, 
departed gayly for Coulterville, where he sold Clark's 
horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and 
bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost 
the entire purchase-money to the happy buyer (Clark 
got his horse again on proving title), — and finally 
vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his 



438 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villainies. 
Nowhere out of California or old Spain can there 
exist such a modern survivor of the days of Gil Bias ! 

Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own 
animals to waste time in hue and cry, I loaded my 
two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our commis- 
sariat needed, — nooned at Clark's, on my way back, 
the J:hird day after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, 
and that same night was among my rejoicing com- 
rades at the head of the great Yo-Semite. That 
afternoon they had come to the bottom of the flour- 
bag, after living for three days on unleavened slap- 
jacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen 
people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover- 
bread ; but, after such an experience as our party's, 
I venture to say they would have regarded it worthy 
of a place among the other abolished types of the 
Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we 
felt our hearts swell within us as if we had come to 
raise the siege of Leyden. In that same enthusiasm 
shared our artists, savans, and gentlemen, embracing 
the shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother 
what time they realized that his panniers were full. 
Can any one wonder at my early words, " A slapjack 
may be the last plank between the woodsman and 
starvation ? " 

Just before I started after supplies, our party moved 
its camp to a position five miles up the Valley beyond 
Camp Rattlesnake, in a beautiful grove of oaks and 
cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Mer-» 
ced margin, with rich pasture for our animals imme- 
diately across the stream, and the loftiest cataract in 
the world roaring over the bleak precipice opposite. 
This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian, 




OUO-LOOKK, THE VO-.sJmMITK FALL. See pa^e 439. 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 439 

" Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys 
this fall is credited with the astounding height of 
twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early period the 
entire mass of water must have plunged that dis- 
tance without break. At this day a single ledge of 
slant projection changes the headlong flood from cat- 
aract to rapids for about four hundred feet ; but the 
unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the 
lower thirteen hundred. In the spring and early 
summer no more magnificent sight can be imagined 
than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in 
the midst of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing 
thirty miles ' an hour, from the thundering basin of 
the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the grand- 
est mountain-waterfall in the known world. 

While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit 
" Po-ho-no," or " The Bridal Veil," which was passed 
on the southern side in our way to the second and 
about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was 
a good, so is Po-ho-no an evil spirit of the Indian my- 
thology. This tradition is scientifically accounted 
for, in the fact that many Indians have been carried 
over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind 
and water forever rushing down a canon through 
which the stream breaks from its feeding-lake twelve 
or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers his 
voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po- 
ho-no ; while the very utterance of the name is so 
dreaded by him that the discoverers of the Valley 
obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on 
a heap of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a 
thousand feet perpendicular, thus being the next in 
height among all the Valley cataracts to the Yo-Sem- 
ite itself, and having ,a width of fifty feet. Its name 



440 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of " The Bridal Veil " is one of the few successes in 
fantastic nomenclature ; for, to one viewing it in pro- 
file, its snowy sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace 
of spray, and falling quite free of the brow of the 
precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth 
at her granite wedding, — no commemorator of any 
fifty years' bagatelle like the golden one, but crown- 
ing the one millionth anniversary of her nuptials. 

On either side of Po-ho-no the sky-line of the pre- 
cipice is magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a 
deep gorge into the crown of the battlement. On 
the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly bold, 
but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. 
Near by is Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, 
towering to thirty-three hundred feet. A little fur- 
ther are " Eleachas," or " The Three Brothers," flush 
with the front surface of the precipice, but their up- 
per posterior bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, 
which reach a height of thirty-four hundred and fifty 
feet. 

One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the 
shore of Lake Ah-wi-yah, — a crystal pond of several 
acres in extent, fed by the north fork of the valley 
stream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow 
strait between the North and South Domes. By this 
tranquil water we pitched our third camp, and when 
the rising sun began to shine through the mighty 
cleft before us, the play of color and chiaroscuro on its 
rugged walls was something for which an artist apt 
to oversleep himself might well have sat up all the 
night. No such precaution was needed by ourselves. 
Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out 
by dawn ; for the studies were grander, the grouse 
and quail plentier, and the butterflies more gorgeous 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 441 

than we found in any other portion of the Valley. 
After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the 
river more enchanting at every step. I was obliged 
to penetrate in this direction entirely on foot, — clam- 
bering between squared blocks of granite dislodged 
from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of 
which might have been excavated into a commodious 
church, and discovering, for the pains cost by a re- 
connoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest 
shady stretches of singing water and some of the 
finest minor waterfalls in our American scenery. 

Our last camp was pitched among the crags and 
forests behind the South Dome, — where the Middle 
Fork descends through two successive waterfalls, 
which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass 
Cho-looke, while the loftiest is nearly as high as Po- 
ho-no. About three miles west of the Domes, the 
south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep canon 
leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through 
this carton comes the Middle Fork, and along its banks 
lies our course to the great " Pi-wi-ack " (senselessly 
Englished as "Vernal") and the Nevada Falls. For 
three miles from our camp, opposite the Yo-Semite 
Fall, the canon is threaded by a trail practicable for 
horses. At its termination we dismounted, sent back 
our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our own 
shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less 
rugged than the trackless crags around us. In some 
places we were compelled to squeeze sideways through 
a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent danger to 
our burden of blankets and camp-kettles ; in others 
we became quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with 
which the bald main precipice had made but slight 
compromise. But for our light marching order, — 



442 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

our only dress being knee-boots, hunting-shirt, and 
trousers, — it would have been next to impossible to 
reach our goal at all. 

But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained 
sinews, when, at the end of our last terrible climb, we 
stood upon the oozy sod which is brightened into eter- 
nal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our 
slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the rag- 
ged chasm, down which the snowy river charges roar- 
ing after its first headlong plunge ; an eternal rainbow 
flung its shimmering arch across the mighty cauldron 
at the base of the fall ; and straight before us in one 
unbroken leap came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite 
shelf nearly four hundred feet in height and sixty 
feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterpris- 
ing speculator, who has since ceased to take the orig- 
inal seventy-five cents' toll, a few years ago built a 
substantial set of rude ladders against the perpendic- 
ular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it 
still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a 
shower of spray, so close to the edge of the fall that 
we could almost wet our hands in its rim. t)nce at 
the top, we found that Nature had been as accommo- 
dating to the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge 
we landed on was a perfect breastwork, built from the 
receding precipices on either side of the canon to the 
very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves 
need not have trembled, when once within the para- 
pet, on the smooth, flat rampart, and looking down 
into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we had 
just climbed. 

Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the 
bottom of a granite cradle, sloping upward from it 
on each side at an angle of about forty-five degrees, 



SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE. 443 

in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a 
crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where 
even the scraggiest manzanita may catch hold and 
grow. This tilted formation, broken here and there 
by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, con- 
tinues upward till it intersects the posterior cone of 
the South Dome on one side and a colossal castellated 
precipice on the other, — creating thus the very typ- 
ical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining 
barrenness of these rocks, and the utter nakedness 
of that vast glittering dome which hollows the heav- 
ens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any meta- 
phor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned 
slopes of the Alleghany chain. 

Climbing between the stunted pines and giant 
blocks along the stream's immediate margin, — get- 
ting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork 
of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and 
the black whirls which spun in the deep pits of the 
roaring bed beneath us, — we came at last to the base 
of " Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall. 

This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, 
perhaps, the most beautiful of the Yo-Semite cata- 
racts. Its beauty is partly owing to the surrounding 
rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its 
great height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing 
volume, but mainly to its exquisite and unusual 
shape. It falls from a precipice the highest portion 
of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the 
wall overleapt by Pi-wi-ack ; but invisibly beneath its 
snowy flood a ledge slants sideways from the cliff 
about a hundred feet below the crown of the fall, and 
at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb- 
line. Over this ledge the water is deflected upon one 



444 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

side, and spread like a half-open fan to the width of 
nearly two hundred feet. 

At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a cul- 
de-sac of Nature's grandest labyrinth. Look where 
we will, impregnable battlements hem us in. We 
gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage gran- 
ite harathrum, whence there is no escape but return 
through the chinks and over the crags of an old- 
world convulsion. We are at the -end of the stu- 
pendous series of Yo-Semite efects ; eight hundred 
feet above us, could we climb there, we should find 
the silent causes of power. There lie the broad, still 
pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow- 
peaks ; thence might we see, glittering like diamond 
lances in the sun, the eternal snow-peaks themselves. 
But these would still be as far above us as we stood 
below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley bottom whence 
we came. Even from Inspiration Point, where our 
trail first struck the battlement, we could see far be- 
yond the Valley to the rising sun, towering mightily 
above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting snow fore- 
head of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cut- 
ting the sky at the topmost height of the Sierra. 
We had spoken of reaching him, — of holding con- 
verse with the King of all the Giants. This whole 
weary way have we toiled since then, — and we know 
better now. Have we endured all these pains only 
to learn still deeper life's saddest lesson, — "Climb 
forever, and there is still an Inaccessible ? " 

Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Na- 
ture's topmost treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye answers us, 
ere we turn back from the Yo-Semite's last precipice 
toward the haunts of men : — 

" Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest 
comes down to you ! " 



CHAPTER X. 

ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 

After my return from the Yo-Semite Valley, I re- 
mained in San Francisco, or its delightful neighbor- 
hood, making short excursions around and across the 
bay, for more than a fortnight. But this lotus-eating 
life soon palled. I burned to see the giant Shasta, 
and grew thirsty for the eternal snows of the Cascade 
Peaks still further north. So much of a horseback 
ride to the Columbia as brought us into Oregon I 
here propose to sketch in brief. 

With the exception of one artist companion and 
myself, our party had become sated with travel, and 
gone home. One glorious September day we two 
took our saddle-bags, note-books, and color-boxes, put 
our horses on board the Sacramento steamer, and, 
without other baggage or company of any sort, set out 
for the Columbia River and Vancouver's Island. 

At Sacramento, on the next morning after leaving 
San Francisco, we shifted our quarters to a smaller 
and light-draught boat which was to take us up the 
shallow river to its head of navigation. This arrange- 
ment was a great economy of time. The country 
bordering the Upper Sacramento, for two hundred 
miles from the Californian capital, is level and com- 
paratively tame, so that no artistic advantage would 
have resulted from following the bank on horseback. 
From the little steamer the view became a perpetual 



446 THE HEAKT OF THE CONTINENT. 

pleasure. About twenty miles above Sacramento we 
passed the mouth of Feather River, disgorging coffee- 
colored mud from the innumerable gold diggings 
along its course, and came into lovely blue water, 
pure as the cradling snow-ridges between which it 
issued. The immediate margin began to be thickly 
wooded with overhanging willows, oaks, and syca- 
mores. These were alive with birds of every aqua- 
tic description. The shag, a large fowl of black and 
dingy-white plumage, apparently belonging to the 
cormorant family, peopled every dead tree with a live 
fruit whose weight nearly cracked its branches ; every 
snag projecting from the river-bed was studded with a 
row of the same creatures at mathematically equal 
intervals, each possessing just room enough for his 
favorite pastime of slowly opening his wings to the 
utmost, and then shutting them again in solemn 
rhythm, like a pupil of Dr. Dio Lewis's, or a patient 
in the Swedish Movement-cure. The quiet embayed 
pools and eddies swarmed with ducks ; every sunny 
bar or level beach was a stalking-ground for stately 
cranes, both white and sand-hill ; and garrulous crows 
kept the air lively, in company with big California 
magpies, above our heads. 

The course of the river grew more and more sinu- 
ous as we ascended ; it was near the close of the dry 
season, and there remained none of those cut-offs 
which economize distance during the prevalence of 
the rains. The Upper Sacramento, especially when 
softened and rendered illusory by such a full moon as 
it was our good fortune to travel under, perpetually 
recalls that loveliest of fairy streams, the higher St. 
John's, in Florida. Nothing out of dreams is more 
peacefully enchanting than the embowered stretches 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 447 

of clear water rippled into silver arabesque through 
a long moonlight night, or the hazy vistas, impur- 
pled by twilight, into which one swings around the 
short curves of the Sacramento, amid a silence that 
would be absolute but for his own motion, while be- 
yond either woody margin the great plains spread 
away untenanted, a waving wilderness of wild grass 
and tide. 

Enjoying the far-mente of a life of such sweet mono- 
tone all the more because it was such a contrast to 
our rough riding, past and future, we spent two 
golden days, as many mezzotint twilights, and a pair 
of silver nights upon our steamer. On the morning 
of the third day we reached Tehama, a dead-and-alive 
little settlement, seven hours' journey by the river- 
windings from Red Bluffs, the head of navigation, but 
only ten miles by land. We had now got in sight 
of mountains ; the ethereal blue of Lassen's Buttes, 
rimmed with the opal of perpetual snow, bounded our 
view northerly ; and as every motive for taking to 
the saddle now consisted with our desire for econo- 
mizing time, we here began our horseback ride, reach- 
ing Red Bluffs several hours before the steamer. 

Just out of Tehama we struck into a country whose 
features reminded us of the wooded tracts between 
Stockton and Mariposa. After two days of tule and 
wild grass, Nature grew suddenly ennobled in our 
eyes by thick and frequent groves of the royal Cali- 
fornia oak. There was a feeling of luxury in the 
change, which none can know who have not had a 
surfeit of boundless plains. We bathed our hearts 
and heads in shadow ; the fever of imbroken light 
went out of us ; our very horses shared in the relief, 
and gave themselves up to a sweet somnambulism 



448 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

with which we had too much sympathy to break it by 
spurs. 

Red Bluffs we found a place of more apparent stir 
and enterprise than any Californian town we had seen, 
except San Francisco and Sacramento. There was 
quite a New England air about the main street, — so 
much so that I have forgotten to call it Plaza, as I 
ought. This place is the starting-pomt for all Over- 
land supplies sent between the Sacramento and Port- 
land. Immense wagons — shaped like the Eastern 
charcoal-vehicle, but dwarfing it into insignificance 
by a size not much inferior to that of a Mississippi 
flat-boat — are perpetually leaving the town, drawn 
by twelve mules or horses, and in charge of drivers 
whose magnificent isolation has individualized them 
to a degree not exceeded in the most characteristic 
coachman of the Weller tribe, or the typical skipper 
of the Yankee fishing-smack. There are few finer 
places to study genre than the California ranches fre- 
quented by the captains of these " prairie schooners." 
At convenient distances for noon halts and nightly 
turnings-in, the main freighting-roads of the State 
are adorned with gigantic caravanserais offering every 
accommodation for man and beast, provided with ar- 
cades straddling nearly across the road, under which 
all passing wagoners not only may, but must, shelter 
themselves from the rigors of rain or sun, and billeted 
along their fronts with seductive descriptions of the 
paradise within, to which few hearts prove obdurate 
after being softened by the compulsory magnanimity 
of the arcade. 

In time there must be a railroad all the way from 
Sacramento to Portland. There is not a mile of the 
distance between Red Bluffs and the Oregon metrop- 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 449 

olis where it is not greatly needed already. Nearly 
the whole intervening region is exhaustlessly fertile, 
— one of the finest fruit countries in the world, — but 
so entirely without an economical avenue for its sup- 
plies or outlet for its productions, that many of the 
ranchmen who have settled in it feel despondent in 
the midst of abundance, and leave hundreds of mag- 
nificent orchard acres paved with rotting aj)ples which 
would command a " bit " a pound in the San Fran- 
cisco market, if the freight did not more than con- 
sume the profit, and the length of the journey render 
the fruit unsalable. 

The first day out from Tehama we made a distance 
of nearly forty miles, — part of the way through oak- 
groves and part over fine breezy plains, with the no- 
ble mountain chain out of which Lassen's Buttes rise 
into the perpetual-snow region continually in sight 
on the right hand. The only incident that occurred 
to us this day, in any other key than that of pure 
sensuous dehght in the fact of life and motion under 
such a spotless sky and in an air that was such breath- 
able elixir, together with the artistic happiness which 
flowed down on us from the noble neighboring moun- 
tains, was our discovery early in the afternoon of a 
cloud of dust about half a mile ahead, with the forms 
of a hundred horsemen dimly looming through it. 
Such a sight sets an old Overlander instinctively fum- 
bling at his holsters ; fresh as we were from the hor- 
rors of the desert, we felt our scalps begin to detach 
themselves slightly from the cranium. But we rode 
straight ahead, as our only method of safety was to 
wear a bold front, if the cavaliers were, as we half 
suspected, a party of Humboldt Indians, who had 
lately taken the war-path between Lassen's Buttes 

29 



450 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

and the coast. I don't recollect ever having been 
better pleased with the look of Uncle Sam's cavalry 
uniform than we were, upon coming up with the 
squad and finding it a detachment of our own men 
sent out to chastise the savages. 

That night we reached a ranch called the " Ameri- 
can," — and certainly its title was none too ambitious, 
for it had the whole horizon to itself, and to all ap- 
pearance might have been the only house on the Con- 
tinent. It was a place unvisited of fresh meat and 
ignorant of gridirons; but we were tired enough, 
after the first day of our return to the saddle, to sleep 
soundly in a bed of tea-tray dimensions, and under 
what appeared to be a casual selection from a hamper 
of soiled pocket handkerchiefs, when we had dis- 
patched the first of that long series of suppers on 
fried pork and green -serpentine saleratus-biscuits 
which stretched between us and the northern edge 
of Oregon. 

Though the month was September, the heat in the 
middle of the day upon the broad, rolling plains we 
now had to traverse was as oppressive as an Eastern 
July. During our whole horseback journey, therefore, 
we made it our custom to rise as soon after dawn as 
possible, breakfast, travel a stage of fifteen or twenty 
miles, make a long midday halt in some pleasant 
nook, and push on twenty miles further before we 
unsaddled for the night. We were jufft now enabled 
to make this second stage the most leisurely and the 
longest of the two, — for the moon was still in all the 
glory of its California brightness and plenitude, and 
to have travelled by moonlight between the Sacra- 
mento and Mount Shasta is one of the prominent 
memories of a life-time. No patriotic attachment is 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 451 

demanded to make the Californian say with the Irish- 
man, that his country's full moon is twice as large and 
splendid as any other's. Phenomenally, at least, the 
bare facts support him. 

At noon of the day on which we left the American 
Ranch, we came up a rugged hill into the settlement 
of Shasta. This town is a mining depot of some im- 
portance, chiefly memorable to us for some excellent 
pie, made out of the California apple-melon, in won- 
derful imitation of the Eastern green-apple tart, and 
a charge of five dollars and a half in gold made by 
the great Californian Express Company for bringing 
a color-box (heavy as a small valise) from Red Bluffs, 
whither we had let it go on by boat. Why this 
should have left a memorable impression on our 
minds it would be hard to say ; for, although the de- 
mand was somewhat more than the stage employed 
by the Express Company would have charged to take 
either one of us the same distance, accompanied by a 
heavy trunk, we should by this time have acquired 
sufficient familiarity with extortion from the Compa- 
ny's officials to have paid very quietly a bill of fifty 
dollars for the same service, and then dismissed the 
trifling matter from our minds. But indignation at 
swindles is sometimes cumulative. 

At the town of Shasta we left the main wagon road, 
— finding that it passed a long way from the most 
important point on our itinerary, the base of Shasta 
Peak. By striking across the country six miles to the 
small settlement of Buckeye, we intersected a route 
little travelled, but far more picturesque, and leading 
directly to the great object of our longings. On the 
way to Buckeye we again encountered the Sacra- 
mento, here dwindled to a narrow mountain stream. 



4§2 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

with bold, precipitous banks and a rock bottom, a 
smooth and deep, but rapid current, and full of trout 
and salmon. We crossed it on a rope-ferry, and 
climbed the steeps on the other side, but did not 
leave it. Thenceforward to Shasta Peak we were 
never out of its neighborhood. 

By this detour of ours we came into a country bet- 
ter wooded and watered than any through which we 
had been travelling. When the sun left us, we found 
the moonlight so seductive that we pushed on late 
into the evening, — making our all-night halt at a 
ranchman's whose name had been' given us by some 
passing native, who praised his accommodations un- 
boundedly, but proved much more of a friend to him 
than to ourselves. It is a duty to visit the afflicted. 
It is a misfortune, not a crime, to have a wife and six 
children, the latter all under twelve years of age. It 
is a still greater and no less irresponsible calamity to 
have them all prostrated by chills-and-fever, yet for- 
bidden to yield to its depressing influence by the 
stimulus of several million healthy fleas. Ignorance, 
not willfulness, may be at the causal bottom of a batch 
of bread which is half saleratus, and a stew of ven- 
erable hens which is one third feathers. Nor can we 
regard it as other than a beneficent arrangement in 
the grand scheme of Nature's laws, that a pack of 
noble hounds should pass the hours of slumber around 
our humble casement in the free indulgence of a lib- 
erty distinctly authorized by the sacred Watts, as fol- 
lows : — 

" Let dogs delight to bark," etc. 

Still, I think public opinion will sustain me in the 
view that the much afflicted family were not agreea- 
ble to pass the night with. 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 453 

This is the place for a useful financial statement. 
Everything on our present trip cost a dollar. Bed for 
one, i. e. one's share of a bed for two, — supper, — 
each horse's forage, — breakfast, — every several item, 
a dollar. No matter how afflicted the family, sale- 
ratusy the bread, loud the dogs, — nothing was fur- 
nished under the dollar. When people happen to 
have enough dollars, this becomes comic. It reminded 
us of the Catskill Mountain House, where in specie 
times everything (after hotel bills) was twenty-five 
cents, — from getting a waiter to look at you, to hav- 
ing the Falls tipped up for you and spilt over. 

The day's journey between the afflicted family and 
Dog Creek, where we stopped the third night, is such 
an affluent remembrance of beauty that I feel glad 
while I write about it. We started under circum- 
stances somewhat tedious. Nobody was going toward 
Mount Shasta with so much as a pack-mule. The 
father of the afflicted family labored under the blight 
of his surroundings, and after severe thought gave up 
the task of attempting to recall when anybody had 
been going toward Mount Shasta. It was also too 
much for him to calculate when anybody would be 
going. We paid him his dollars, — wished that his 
shadow might never be less, which it couldn't very 
well, unless the ague can dance on a mathematical 
line, — and set out with the color-box carried alter- 
nately before us on our pommels. It had been our 
Mte noire from the time five dollars and fifty cents 
ransomed it at Shasta. We now began to wonder 
whether the Express Company also had carried it on 
a pommel, — in which case we thought we could for- 
give the Express Company. The morning was sultry, 
and as we started our horses forth upon a walk, — for 



454 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the box could not stand jolting, — we looked forward 
to a tiresome day. 

As we went on, Nature seemed determined to kiss 
us out of the sulks. Just as we broke into fresh 
grumbles, which we wanted to indulge, and our horses 
into fresh trots, which we desired, but could not tol- 
erate, we entered some lovely glen, musical with tink- 
ling springs, its walling banks tapestried with the 
richest velvet of deep-green grass, brocaded with 
spots of leaf-filtered sunshine. When we began to 
swelter, we came into the dense shadow of great 
oaks, or caught the balmiest wind in the world 
through aromatic pine and cedar vistas along the 
crown of some lofty ridge. It was impossible to be 
vexed with the step-mother. Fate, when the fingers 
of our mother. Nature, were straying through our 
hair. To drive away the last elf of ill-humor, and 
make us thenceforth agree to regard the box as an 
ornamental appendage which we were good-natured 
enough to let each other enjoy by turns, Pitt Eiver, 
the last fork of the Upper Sacramento, came glancing 
into our landscape, the very perfection of fluent free- 
dom and gladness. Every rod of the journey along 
its west bank disclosed a new picture. The misty 
blue mountains of the range toward Shasta Peak 
formed the abiding background of every view. Steep, 
fir-battlemented banks of one generic form, but end- 
less variety in the beauty of the tree forms and 
groups which rose from their glacis, mile after mile, 
framed in some new loveUness of light-and-shadow 
flecked bend, deep sepia-dark pool, singing shallow, or 
brawling rapid of the clear stream. Eagles were sail- 
ing, like a placid thought in a large heart, far over 
our heads in the intimacy of a spotless sky; the great 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 455 

ground-squirrel flashed like a gray gleam over the 
gnarled mossy roots at the side of our narrow dug- 
way ; and in brilliant blots or darting shafts of Ma- 
genta fire, we recognized among the tree-tops that 
loveliest bird of the North American forest, the great 
crested woodpecker. Here and there, to introduce a 
human element, came cleared spaces- by the river's 
brink, where pointed wands stood impaling flakes of 
red salmon-flesh, — the open-air curing-house and out- 
door store-room of the Pitt River Indians. Once in 
the course of the day we lighted on a picturesque 
ragged hut, where the purveyors of this meat were 
soaking themselves in full side-hill sunlight, — where 
little savages of every degree of gauntness in their 
limbs, ochriness on their cheeks, shockiness in their 
heads, and protuberance in their abdomens, were 
gorging themselves to still more hideous ventral 
embonpoint, — where white men, lower than the lowest 
Diggers they herded with, had forgotten the little 
they ever knew of civilization, and stood glaring at 
us like half-sated satyrs as we passed. Other bits of 
genre hourly came into the picture with papoose- 
carrying squaws who hunted yew-berries along the 
road-side fringe of woods, youngsters wearing no at- 
tire but a parti-colored acorn basket of deft finger- 
work, which they carried loaded on their shoulders, 
or listlessly trailed empty at their sides. Dr. Prichard 
has some hideous pictures of Papuans and Australians; 
but if Ethnology were a match game, we could give 
him those two points, and beat him easily by playing 
a few of the Digger women whom we saw that day. 
They reached the ugliness of aboriginal specimens 
which we had encountered on the west verge of the 
Goshoot country; and if any earthly pilgrimage, short 



456 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

of the mountains of Nightmare, can reveal their rivals, 
I should like to get into a prime state of health, and 
be allowed a peep at them through a spy-glass. 

The condition of the white men who live and make 
alliances with these poor creatures is too heart-sick- 
ening to print. The law that governs all associations 
of culture with barbarism, where the latter is in dy- 
namic excess, holds rigorously true in California. The 
higher race recollects only the cultivated evil of the 
state whence it fell, — and carrying to its savage 
mates subtler means of accomplishing vice than they 
knew before, presently gives rise to a combination 
from which all the simplicity of the low race is elim- 
inated, and into which enter all the devils of mature 
civilization. Nor do these devils come accompanied 
by a single grace or angel which softened or re- 
strained crime in the developed community. The at- 
tachment of this region's older settlers for their sav- 
age comrades is something incredible. To enjoy their 
society, they cheerfully embrace a life as impure, un- 
cleanly, free from all humanizing influences, as that 
of the lowest Digger with whom they consort. Some- 
times a strange incongruous romance, like moonlight 
on a puddle, lights up these mongrel liaisons, and in- 
fuses into them a burlesque of sentiment. We found 
one old hunter whose squaw ran away from him into 
the mountains at regular six months' intervals, and 
who invariably spent hundreds of dollars and no end 
to hardships in hunting her up and restoring her to 
his wigwam. Another, who had kept an Indian se- 
raglio from the time of the earliest gold discoveries, 
had repeatedly been to the nearest legal officer (two 
or three days' journey off), and besought him, without 
effect, to marry him to one of liis squaws in Christian 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 457 

fashion. It certainly did seem hard that the poor fel- 
low should be forbidden to make the only reparation 
in his power for wrongs of twelve years' standing ; 
but the aesthetic, naturally enough to those who have 
seen Diggers, predominated over the legal and moral 
in the judicial mind, and he was finally sent away 
with an injunction never to show his face again while 
" this court continued to know herself" in the Shasta 
region. 

As often happens in the discipline of human life, 
the thorn in the flesh was withdrawn as soon as we 
had learned the lesson of bearing it resignedly. At the 
last crossing of the Sacramento, we learned from the 
ferryman that a providential wagoner was just ahead 
of us, going certainly to Dog Creek, and presumably, 
if we made it an object, all the way to Strawberry 
Valley, at the foot of Shasta. The one whose turn it 
was not to carry the color-box galloped ahead, and 
detained the wagoner until the heavy dragoon had 
time to come up. With a deep sigh of relief, we 
stowed our box in the " prairie schooner," — made a 
contract to have it packed on mule-back from Dog 
Creek to Shasta, in consideration of one among a 
gross of cheap watches which we had brought for 
trade with Indians and Trappers, — and, relieving our 
horses by the first canter they had enjoyed that day, 
sped away with the deep conviction that the man 
who first called chrome and white lead light colors 
must have been indulging the subtile irony of a dis- 
eased mind. 

The seven miles of our journey from the last Sac- 
ramento crossing to Dog Creek were even grander in 
their scenery than our morning stage. The road was 
a dug-way from one to seven hundred feet above the 



458 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

base of a winding castellated cliff, here and there cut 
in rugged sandstone, but often both walled and but- 
tressed with steep slopes of virgin turf kept emerald 
by innumerable trickling springs, ice-cold and crystal- 
clear, while here and there it passed through woods 
as dark as twilight. The slope on which we travelled 
formed one side of a valley, green at its bottom as a 
New England meadow, and watered by a picturesque 
affluent of the Sacramento. About dark we came to 
the Dog Creek Ranch, where we had such a delicious 
supper of trout, cooked in the good old Green Moun- 
tain fashion with an Indian meal night-gown on, as 
made us " forget the steps already trod," followed by 
a really nice pair of beds, wherein we took long and 
ample preparation to "onward urge our way" upon 
the morrow. 

At Dog Creek we were encamped round about by 
the largest and most prosperous Indian tribe that we 
had seen on our trip. Their bows and arrows were 
elegant in shape and color : the former stained in a 
variety of patterns, sometimes carved, and wrapped 
as well as strung with deer sinews ; the latter headed 
with nicely cut pieces of a black obsidian which 
abounds in the vicinity of Shasta Peak, and which of 
itself is an unerring test of the original volcanic 
character of the mountain. The quivers of this Dog 
Creek tribe were the most beautiful preparations 
of whole mink, otter, and sable skins, which I have 
seen in Indian hands anywhere on the Continent. 
One of the men had a great cap made out of an en- 
tire grizzly cub-skin, the claws very nicely preserved 
and dangling behind, while the head curved forward 
on top like the crest of an old Greek helmet. No- 
where did we find neater, more ornamental berry 



ON HORSEBACK IKTO OREGON. 459 

baskets, or more carefully worked dishes and basins, 
than those woven or scooped and stained by this 
tribe. In wandering through their stick-and-bark 
lodges, we found some tolerably good-looking men, 
far above the average brutality of the Diggers, with 
simple, pleasant expressions, and not afraid to look 
one in the eye. In one lodge crouched a man and 
woman who without exception were the oldest-look- 
ing people I ever saw. The husband was blind, the 
wife palsied ; but they had been left in charge of a 
sprawling family of their fifth generation, which haste 
and the warm weather forbade our counting; I gave 
the old lady a plug of tobacco, and watched, as she 
put it up against her husband's face, to see which of 
the wrinkles was his mouth ; while, on her filling a 
pipe and smoking with grunts of evident approba- 
tion directed to myself, I felt pleasant and biblical, 
as if I had been doing a good turn to Methuselah's 
aunt. 

Only forty miles more stretched between us and 
Shasta Peak. We had now reached an elevation 
where it was visible to us in its full majesty from the 
southwestern side. All day, after our leaving Dog 
Creek, its giant cone, snow-wrapt half way to the 
base, kept surprising us through clefts in the sur- 
rounding crags at the end of long wooded vistas, or 
on some clear, treeless height to which we had climbed, 
forgetting the mountain in our heat and labor. The 
country about us was becoming wilder and wilder : 
our road was sometimes a mere trail, half obliterated 
by springs or traversing rivulets. We now rode in 
the woods most of the time, and found the shadow, 
stillness, and fragrance all delicious. Beside all the 
springs we discovered the southernwood of our East- 



460 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

ern gardens growing wild, its strawberry-scented and 
maroon-colored buds much larger than those of our 
variety, and, though a trifle less intense in their per- 
fume, still sufficiently sweet to make every nook in 
which they grew delicious for yards around. Here 
and there the woods showed some symptoms of au- 
tumnal change ; there were hectic spots now and then 
on the maple leaves ; but nothing approaching in 
loveliness the forest euthanasia of our Eastern fall 
appeared until we had crossed the boundary of Ore- 
gon. Shasta Peak is, by the track, nearly eighty 
miles from that line. To-day, just as the sun got 
down to the tree-tops, the wooded slope suddenly re- 
ceded from our left, and towered into one of those 
noble crags which all over the Continent go by the 
name of "Castle Rock," but which include no instance 
more truly deserving the name than this bold mass of 
pinnacles and bastions, bare as a Yo-Semite precipice, 
which lifted itself apparently about a thousand feet 
above the green glacis of the slope, stern and gray at 
the base, but etherealized along its crest and battle- 
ment by sunset splendors of red and gold. Simulta- 
neously with the Castle's appearance, our leafy covert 
parted before us, and disclosed in level light, which 
made its snow opalescent, and bathed its vast, rugged 
masses of stone and earth in one inclusive winy glow, 
the glorious giant of California which had drawn us 
hither through the wilderness. The height of Shasta 
is variously stated. It is certainly over sixteen thou- 
sand feet, and may likely be nearer eighteen thousand. 
One geological survey pronounces it the highest 
mountain in the Nevada Range, — a statement taking 
into account Mount Hood and the other great peaks 
of the Cascade system, which itself is but an Oregon 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 461 

reappearance of the Sierra Nevada. The distance 
from which Hood, Saint Helen's, and Ranier could be 
seen with the naked eye led us afterward to regard 
this statement with some doubt ; but certainly no 
peak which we met in all our large experience of the 
mountains of this Continent ever compared with 
Shasta in producing the effect of vast height. All 
the others which we have seen, with the exception of 
Lander's Peak, whether in the Rocky, the Nevada, 
the Cascade, or the Pacific Coast Range, have suffered, 
visually, from modulation through their gradually as- 
cending tiers of foot-hills, or by the blending of their 
outlines with the neighboring peaks. This is espe- 
cially so with Pike's Peak, which, despite its being 
one of the loftiest mountains in America, has its pro- 
portions most dissatisfyingly disguised, in all but a 
single point of view in the canon of the Fontaine-qui- 
Bouille. Shasta is a mountain without mediations. 
It sits on the verge of a plain, broken for a hundred 
miles to the northward only by pigmy volcanic cones 
heaped around extinct solfataras. We approached it 
in the only direction where there were anything like 
foot-hills to climb ; but even upon us, on reaching 
Strawberry Valley, at its southwestern foot, the won- 
derful peak broke with as little feeling of gradual 
approach as if we had not seen its head glowing 
grander and more real out of the blue distance re- 
peatedlj'- during the last three days. When we first 
saw the whole of it distinctly, it seemed to make no 
compromise with surrounding plains or ridges, but 
rose in naked majesty, alone and simple from the 
grass of our valley to its own topmost iridescent ice. 
That view was not accorded to us on our first day 
out from Dog Creek. It was nearly dark when we 



462 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

reached the Soda Springs, nine miles south of Straw- 
berry, — took a draught of the most delicious mineral 
water I ever drank, more piquant than Kissingen, 
and cold as ice, — resisted the seductions of a small, 
premature boy of eight, who issued from the Springs 
Ranch to dilate agedly on the tonic properties of the 
water, the relaxing virtues of the beds, and the ter- 
rors of the grim forest which lay for us in the black 
night between there and Strawberry, — and, clapping 
spurs to our tired horses, pushed forward with stern 
determination to reach Sisson's that evening. 

I think that a darker night than presently lapped 
us among the thick evergreens was never travelled 
in. There were some streaks of blackness a mile 
long, in which, literally, I could not see my horse's 
head. But we had learned confidence in our animals' 
sagacity, and walked them, cheerily whistling to keep 
each other informed of our whereabouts, through at 
least six miles of road utterly 'unknown to and un- 
seen by us. It was what Eastern people call very 
" poky ; " but the language addressed to us by the 
premature boy had made it a matter of personal self- 
respect for us to get to Sisson's that night. With a 
certain sense of triumph over that unpleasant and 
dissuasive child, we saw a lantern gleam from a cor- 
ral about ten p. m., and had our interrogative hail of 
" Sisson's ? " answered in welcome affirmative by Sis- 
son himself 

At Sisson's, or exploring with him in the neighbor- 
hood of Shasta, we passed one of the most delightful 
weeks in our diary of travel through any land. His 
house was a low, two-story building, which had run 
like a verbena in all directions over a grassy level, — 
putting out a fresh arm at every new suggestion of 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 463 

domestic convenience, until it had become at once 
the most amorphous and the most comfortable dwell- 
ing in the California wilds. His herds were populous 
and prosperous ; only the merest pretence of fences 
broke their dream, without affecting their reality, of 
limitless pasture. His ranch ostensibly consisted of 
a few hundred acres ; but old Shasta was his only 
surveyor of landmarks, and his base of supplies was 
coextensive with the base of the mountain. His 
family consisted of an admirably energetic and 
thrifty wife, who had accompanied him from Illinois, 
where he used to be a school-master, and one pretty 
little baby-girl indigenous to Strawberry Valley. The 
presence of this mother and child in a wilderness 
which otherwise howled chiefly with rough sporadic 
men and equally rough ubiquitous bears, was a per- 
petual delight to us, so far from our domestic com- 
munications. We admired Shasta all the more for 
looking at it over a little, gentle, pink -and -white 
baby who lay asleep in its shadow, like a cherub 
pressed to the bosom of one of the Djinn. Escaping 
from the poetical ground, I may observe that be- 
tween the chief French restaurant of Sacramento City 
and the Dennison House in Portland, Oregon, no fam- 
ily whom we encountered lived in such wholesome 
and homelike luxury as Sisson's. If a Society for the 
Diffusion of Gastronomic Intelligence among the 
Heathen is ever founded in California and Oregon 
(and how bitterly such a philanthropic enterprise is 
needed my diary, spotted with the abominable grease 
of universal frying, bears abundant witness), I hope 
that the first tract which it publishes will be a biog- 
raphy of Mrs. Sisson; the first point insisted on by 
that tract, " This excellent and devoted woman used 



464 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

a gridiron." Bless her! how she could broil things! 
No man who has not built up his system during a 
long expedition with brick after brick of pork fried 
hard in its own ooze, — who has not turned all his 
brain's active phosphorus into phosphate of soda by 
alkali biscuits drawn from the oven in the hot-dough 
stage, — who has not drunk his pease-coffee "straight" 
at the tables of repeated Pike settlers too shiftless to 
milk one of their fifty kine, — who has not slept 
myriads in a bed with Cimex lectiilarius and his livelier 
congener of the saltatory habits, — can imagine what 
a blissful bay, in the iron-bound coast of bad living, 
Sisson's seemed to us both in fruition and retrospec- 
tion. We occasionally had beef, when Sisson, or some 
near neighbor ten miles off, '* killed a critter," and 
distributed it around ; excellent mountain mutton, 
flavorous as the Welsh, was not lacking in its turn ; 
but the great stand-by of our table was venison, — 
roast, broiled, made into pasties, treated with every 
variety of preparation save an oil-soak in the pagan 
frying-pan of the country. As for chickens and eggs, 
it "snewe in Sisson's house " of that sort of "mete 
and drinke," — he was Chaucer's Franklin trans- 
ported to Shasta. Cream flowed in upon us like a 
river ; potatoes were stewed in it ; it was the base of 
chicken-sauce ; the sirupy baked pears, whose secret 
Mrs. Sisson had inherited from some dim religious 
ancestor in the New England past, were drowned in 
it ; and we took a glass of it with magical shiny rusk 
for nine o'clock supper, just to oil our joints before 
we relaxed them in innocent repose. Our rooms 
were ample, our beds luxurious, our surroundings the 
grandest within Nature's bestowal. Our capital host 
and hostess became our personal friends j and all 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 465 

that they did for us was so heartily kind and so 
cheerily comfortable, that, if we were asked where, 
on the whole, we passed the pleasantest, as distinct 
from the grandest, week in California, I think we 
should answer, " At Sisson's, in Strawberry Valley." 

Sisson was, without exception, the best rifle-shot I 
ever saw. I have seen him bring down an eagle 
soaring as high as I could see it. Before a target, at 
any distance usual for such experiments, his aim was 
practically unerring. He possessed, in addition, two 
other prime qualities of a first-class woodsman, — 
keen sight for game in covert, and soft-footedness in 
stealing on it, — to a degree so unequaled in my ac- 
quaintance that I feel justified in calling him, not 
only the best shot, but the best hunter I ever knew. 
We spent three days in exploring, sketching, and 
deer-stalking with him, during all which time he was 
never once taken by surprise, but invariably saw his 
game before it scented him, and as invariably cracked 
it over before ourselves, or another old huntsman with 
us, had time to say, " Where is it ? " Our main ex- 
cursion led us about a dozen miles from the house to 
a lofty ridge, populous with game, thickly wooded 
with evergreens, and on its bold prominences giving 
us splendid views of Shasta. No height that we 
could attain dwarfed the grandeur of the mountain 
by sinking its base, and no lateral variation of our 
standing-points produced any change in its shape. 
New delicacies of rock and snow net-work came out 
as we shifted, and the sunlight produced different 
beauties of color and chiaroscuro in the glacier-like 
cradles of its upper ice ; but so far as height and 
form were concerned, it seemed to have no more 
parallax than a fixed star. This fact is of course 

30 



4^66 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

partly due to its being a nearly regular cone, but 
much of it depends on the intrinsic grandeur of a 
mountain standing lonely on the plain, full sixty 
miles in cincture, and in stature nearly eighteen 
thousand feet. 

We came back from our expedition with an abun- 
dance jf venison, a number of interesting color-studies, 
and memories of California scenery surpassed only 
by the Yo-Semite. We had struggled through miles 
of chaparral, after which no abatis that I ever saw on 
the Potomac would have been any discouragement 
to us, provided only we had the same wonderful 
horses. To get some idea of this peculiarly Califor- 
nian institution as we encountered it, imagine a side- 
hill which would have given the best horse a hard 
pull, even had it been bare of undergrowth, and set 
this hill as thick as it will hold with manzanita and 
burr-oak : the former, as its name implies, like a 
little apple-tree, only more viciously gnarled, leath- 
ery, and complicated in its boughs than the most pic- 
turesque old russet in a New England orchard, and 
ramifying at once from the root without any main 
trunk ; the latter, an oak-bush of the same general 
characteristics, having its swarming acorn-cups cov- 
ered with spikes like the chestnut. When these have 
interlocked with each other till the earth is invisible 
and the whole tract has become a lattice of springes 
and pitfalls, push a horse through it three miles up 
a slope of forty -five degrees, the breast-high twigs 
scourging him at every step ; and if you get out, as 
we did, without a fall or a broken leg to either man 
or beast, you will not only have acquired a just idea 
of the California chaparral, but an admiration for the 
California horse which will last you to your dying 



ON HOESEBACK INTO OREGON. 467 

day. To repay us for this struggle, we had found one 
lake lying in a picturesque gorge, only twice before 
visited by white men ; while my artist comrade, al- 
ways the most indefatigable explorer of every party 
we were in together, climbed with his color-box to 
still another lake, of which he was the first discov- 
erer, and whose lovely lineaments he preserved in 
one of the best studies of our trip. Besides these 
results of our expedition, we brought away the satis- 
faction of having leaped our horses across the Sacrar 
mento Kiver. Where it flowed at the bottom of one 
deep ravine we had to traverse, it was a foot deep and 
ten feet wide. The twig which cracked under my 
horse's hoof, and fell into the stream as he sprang 
over, a month hence might be dashing about in the 
scud under the foot of some Pacific whaler, or, still 
further off in time, drift into the harbor of Hong 
Kong. Rivers always seem to me like the nerves of 
Nature : there is no conductor of thought and im- 
pression like that little silver thread which leads out 
from the ganglion of a deep forest spring, to spread, 
many leagues off, upon the sensory surface of the 
Oceanic World. In an earlier chapter I spoke of the 
mighty emotions which came thronging on me at the 
heads of the Platte and the Colorado : I felt them 
only less powerfully when my horse jumped across 
the Sacramento's birthplace. 

After a good day's rest at Sisson's, we bade the cap- 
ital fellow and his excellent wife a good-by which had 
more regret in it than we ever felt before for com- 
rades of a single week's standing, and resumed our 
northward journey. 

The country continued thickly wooded for nearly 
twenty miles from Strawberry, and the forest trail 



468 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

was every now and then drowned out of sight by 
streams rushing from the snow of Shasta. When we 
emerged from the timber, we found ourselves on a 
plain opening widely to the north between diverging 
ridges, and scattered here and there with black sconce 
like the slag of a furnace. In some places an attempt 
had been made to mend the road with lava; and as it 
crunched under our horses' hoofs we could almost 
imagine ourselves making the circuit of Vesuvius, so 
evident was it from the look and feel of things that 
Pluto has at no very remote period boiled his dinner- 
pot on the hob of Shasta Peak. 

The day was fine, — the air more bracing than we 
had found since leaving the Yo-Semite. Our week 
of comparative rest at Sisson's had brought our horses 
into splendid condition for the road ; both we and 
they were boiling over with animal spirits ; and it 
was still early in the afternoon when we rode the 
fortieth mile of our way into Yreka, on the full gal- 
lop. I need not say that we had made other arrange- 
ments than our pommels for the transportation of our 
heavy baggage to the next place where we should 
need it. Sisson, always full of resources, had taken 
good care of that for us both. 

Neither to the traveller nor the raconteur is Yreka 
a place to linger in. It consists of one long street, 
with a tolerable brick hotel at one end, and a kennel 
of straggling houses swarming with Chinese of ill 
odor and worse repute at the other, — intersected by 
half a dozen lanes, devoted principally to stables, 
gambling-shops, and liquor dens. I only quote the 
language of all the inhabitants whom I conversed 
with, when I say that such glory as it once held 
among the northern mining-towns has entirely de- 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 469 

parted from it. The discovery of the Boise and John- 
Day mines to the far northeast has attracted away all 
the principal gold seekers who once dug and panned 
in the vicinity ; and if there ever was a place which 
had nothing intrinsic to fall back upon, it is Yreka. 
We were glad to leave it after one night's rest. 

The day we evacuated it was atmospherically the 
most glorious that we enjoyed upon our whole trip. 
The air had a golden look, as if it not merely trans- 
mitted, but were stained with sunshine. The sky was 
spotless, the weather as warm as our mid-June, but 
without the least languor. The landscape was that 
broad plain I have mentioned, with Shasta on its 
verge, intersected by low rolling ridges, and broken 
by the cones of extinct volcanic spiracles, sometimes 
grouped, but oftener isolated. Shasta himself seemed 
to have gained rather than lost in majesty by our 
forty and now steadily increasing miles of distance. 
Either from atmospheric effect, or because we now 
saw a new and more irregular portion of his crown, 
the snow upon it became opalescent to a degree which 
I have never seen surpassed by any such effect. The 
light reflected from it seemed to gleam like a soft- 
ened flame deep down beneath some pearly medium, 
rather than any rebound of sunlight from a surface. 

The rugged hillocks between which we rode were 
bare and craggy at their tops, but all about their 
base, and far down into the plain, grew abundance of 
a plant wonderfully like the heather in its size as well 
as in the shape and color of its blossoms. Broad, ex- 
quisitely claret-tinted streaks and patches of this 
lovely thing softened the landscape everywhere. We 
seemed to be travelling in a beautiful confusion of 
Nature, where the Scottish Highlands had got to- 



470 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

gether under a California sky with the Roman Cam- 
pagna. Throughout this sweet desolation reigned a 
visible and audible quiet which made our horses' hoofs 
seem noisy. Between Yreka and the Klamath River 
— a narrow, rapid stream, recalling some portions of 
the Housatonic, which we intersected about noon, and 
along which we rode for an hour — we met only two 
or three silent horsemen and as many eremetic wood- 
choppers. 

Turning north from the Klamath, we dined at a 
miserable settlement called Cottonwood, around which 
for miles in every direction departed gold hunters had 
burrowed till the ground was a honey-comb, or more 
properly a last year's hornets' nest, since there was 
no sign of honey in the cells, and, from what a most 
dejected native told us of the yield, never had been 
any to speak of 

Leaving dreary Cottonwood with even greater 
pleasure than we had felt in abandoning Yreka, we 
began ascending the slope toward the Oregon line. 
At every mile the country grew lovelier. California 
seemed determined to make our last impressions of 
her tender. The bare, brown rocks became densely 
wooded with oaks and evergreens. Late in the after- 
noon we came to broad meadows of such refreshing 
deep-green grass as we had not seen before since we 
left the rich farming lands of the Atlantic side, and 
the level golden bars which lay on them between 
forest edges made us homesick with memories of 
peaceful Eastern lawns at sunset. After crossing sev- 
eral miles of such meadows, and the quiet brooks 
which ran through them, we traversed a number of 
strange low ridges, undulating in systematic rhythm, 
like a mountain-chain making a series of false starts 



ON HORSEBACK INTO OREGON. 471 

prior to the word "go," reached the true base of the 
Siskiyou Mountains, and began our final climb out of 
the Golden State. 

The road was very uneven, rocky, cut up by rivu- 
lets from the higher ridges, and in most places only a 
rude dug- way, with a rocky wall on one side, and a 
butment of thickly wooded debris steeply descending 
to a black, brawling torrent on the other. But we 
did not trouble ourselves with the road. The wild 
beauty of the forest absorbed us on either hand ; and 
we were astonished at the rapid transition which the 
leaves suddenly took on, from the dry, burnt look, 
characteristic of the end of the California dry season, 
to autumnal splendors of red and yellow, hardly ri- 
valed by the numberless varieties of tint in our own 
October woods. Just as the sun sank out of sight, 
we reached a lofty commanding ridge, stopped to rest, 
turned around and saw Shasta looming grandly up 
out of the valley twilight, his icy forehead all one 
mass of gold and ruby fire. It was one of the grand- 
est mountain sights I ever looked on : such a purple 
hush over the vast level below us ; such colossal 
broad shadows on the giant's foot ; such a wonderful 
flame on that noble, solitary head, which, but for the 
unbroken outlines leading up to it out of the twi- 
light, might have been only some loftier cloud catch- 
ing good-night sun-glimpses at half-way up the firma- 
ment. Good-night from Shasta ! Alas, not only to 
the sun, but to us ! We felt a real pang, as we con- 
fessed to ourselves that we were now looking upon 
this noblest and serenest, if not loftiest of all the 
mountains in our travel, for the last time in years, — 
perhaps the last forever. We gazed wistfully till ad- 



472 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

monished by the deepening twilight ; then, as Shasta 
became a shadow on the horizon, plunged silently 
into the dense woods again, climbed to the Siskiyou 
summit, and, descending through almost jetty dark- 
ness, were in Oregon. 



CHAPTER XL 

ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 

I HAVE never known, nor seen any person who did 
know, why Portland, the metropoHs of Oregon, was 
founded on the Willamette River. I am unaware why 
the accent is on the penult, and not on the ultimate 
of Willamette. These thoughts perplexed me more 
than a well man would have suffered them, all the 
way from the Callapooya Mountains to Portland. I 
had been laid up in the backwoods of Oregon, in a 
district known as the Long-Tom Country — (and cer- 
tainly a longer or more tedious Tom never existed 
since the days of him additionally hight Aquinas), — 
by a violent attack of pneumonia, which came near 
terminating my earthly with my Oregon pilgrimage. 
I had been saved by the indefatigable nursing of the 
friend I travelled with, — by wet compresses, and the 
impossibility of sending for any doctor in the region. 
I had lived to pay San Francisco hotel prices for 
squatter-cabin accommodations in the rural residence 
of an Oregon landholder, whose tender mercies I fell 
into from my saddle when the disease had reached its 
height, and who explained his unusual charges on the 
ground that his wife had felt for me like a mother. 
In the Long-Tom Country maternal tenderness is a 
highly estimated virtue. It cost my comrade and 
myself sixty dollars, besides the reasonable charge 
for five days' board and attendance to a man who ate 



474 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

nothing and was not waited on, with the same amount 
against his well companion. We had suffered enough 
extortion before that to exhaust all our native grum- 
blery. So we paid the bill, and entered on our note- 
books the following 

Mem. " In stopping with anybody in the Long-Tom 
Country, make a special contract for maternal tender- 
ness, as it will invariably be included in the bill." 

I had ridden on a straw bed in the wagon of the 
man whose wife cultivated the maternal virtues, until 
I was once more able to go along by myself, — pay- 
ing, you may be sure, maternal-virtue fare for my 
carriage. During the period that I jolted on the 
straw, I diversified the intervals between pulmonary 
spasms with a sick glance at the pages of Bulwer's 
" Devereux " and Lever's " Day's Ride." The nature 
of these works did not fail to attract the attention of 
my driver. It aroused in him serious concern for my 
spiritual welfare. He addressed me with gentle firm- 
ness : — 

" D'ye think it's exackly the way for an immortal 
creatur' to be spendin' his time, to read them novels f'* 

" Why is it particularly out of the way for an im- 
mortal creature ? " 

"Because his higher enterests don't give him no 
time for sich follies." 

"How can an immortal creature be pressed for 
time?" 

" Wal, you'll find out some day. G'lang, Jennie." 

I thought I had left this excellent man in a meta- 
physical bog. But he had not discharged his duty, 
60 he scrambled out and took new ground. 

" Now say, — d' ?/ou think it's exackly a Christian 
way of spendin' time, yourself?" 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 475 

" I know a worse way." 

«Eh? What's that?" 

" In the house of a Long-Tom settler who charges 
five dollars a day extra because his wife feels like a 
mother." 

He did not continue the conversation. I myself 
did not close it in anger, but solely to avoid an extra 
charge, which in the light of experience seemed im- 
minent, for concern about my spiritual welfare. On 
the maternal -tenderness scale of prices, an indul- 
gence in this luxury would have cleaned me out be- 
fore I effected junction with my drawers of exchange, 
and I was discourteous as a matter of economy. 

We had enjoyed, from the summit of a hill twenty 
miles south of Salem, one of the most magnificent 
views in all earthly scenery. Within a single sweep 
of vision were seven snow-peaks, — the Three Sisters, 
Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and 
Mount St. Helen's, — with the dim suggestion of an 
eighth colossal mass, which might be Rainier. All 
these rose along an arc of not quite half the horizon, 
measured between ten and eighteen thousand feet in 
height, were nearly conical, and absolutely covered 
with snow from base to pinnacle. The Three Sisters, 
a triplet of sharp, close-set needles, and the grand 
masses of Hood and Jefferson, showed mountainesque 
and earthly ; it was at least possible, to imagine them 
of us, and anchored to the ground we trod on. Not 
so with the others. They were beautiful, yet awful 
ghosts, — spirits of dead mountains buried in old- 
world cataclysms, returning to make, on the brilliant 
azure of noonday, blots of still more brilliant white. 
I cannot express their vague, yet vast and intense 
splendor by any other word than incandescence. It 



476 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

was as if the sky had suddenly grown white-hot in 
patches. When we first looked, we thought St. Hel- 
en's an illusion, — an aurora, or a purer kind of 
cloud. Presently we detected the luminous chromatic 
border, — a band of refracted light with a predomi- 
nant orange tint, which outlines the higher snow- 
peaks seen at long range, — traced it down, and 
grasped the entire conception of the mighty cone. 
No man of enthusiasm, who reflects what this whole 
sight must have been, will wonder that my friend and 
I clasped each other's hands before it, and thanked 
God we had lived to this day. 

We had followed down the beautiful valley of the 
Willamette to Portland, finding everywhere glimpses 
of autumnal scenery as delicious as the hills and 
meadows of the Housatonic. Putting up in Portland 
at the Dennison House, we found the comforts of civil- 
ization for the first time since leaving Sisson's, and a 
great many kind friends warmly interested in further- 
ing our enterprise. I have said that I do not know 
why Portland was built on the Willamette. The point 
of the promontory between the Willamette and the 
Columbia seems the proper place for the chief com- 
mercial city of the State ; and Portland is a dozen 
miles south of this, up the tributary stream. But 
Portland does very well as it is, — growing rapidly in 
business importance, and destined, when the proper 
railway communications are established, to be a sort 
of Glasgow to the London of San Francisco. When 
we were there, there was crying need of a telegraph 
to the latter place. That need has now been sup- 
plied, and the construction of the no less desirable 
railroad must follow speedily. The country between 
Shasta Peak and Salem is at present virtually without 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 477 

an outlet to market. No richer fruit and grain region 
exists on the Pacific slope of the Continent. No one 
who has not travelled through it can imagine the ex- 
haustless fertility which will be stimulated, and the 
results which will be brought forth, when a continu- 
ous line of railroad unites Sacramento, or even Te- 
hama, with the metropolis of Oregon. 

Among the friends who welcomed us to Portland , 
were Messrs. Ainsworth and Thompson, of the Ore- 
gon Steamship Company. By their courtesy we were 
afforded a trip up the Columbia River, in the pleas- 
antest quarters and under the most favorable circum- 
stances. 

We left Portland the evening before their steamer 
sailed, taking a boat belonging to a different line, 
that we might pass a night at Fort Vancouver, and 
board the Company's boat when it touched at that 
place the next morning. We recognized our return 
from rudimentary society to civilized surroundings 
and a cultivated interest in art and literature, when 
the captain of the little steamer Vancouver refused 
to let either of us buy a ticket, because he had seen 
my companion on the upper deck at work with his 
sketch-book, and me by his side engaged with my 
journal. 

The banks of the Willamette below Portland are 
low, and cut up by small tributaries or communi- 
cating lagoons, which divide them into islands. The 
largest of these, measuring its longest border, has an 
extent of twenty miles, and is called Sauveur's. An- 
other, called " Nigger Tom's," was famous as the seign- 
iory of a blind African nobleman so named, living 
in great affluence of salmon and whiskey with three 
or four devoted Indian wives, who had with equal fer- 



478 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

vor embraced the doctrine of Mormonism and the 
profession of day's washing to keep their Hege in lux- 
ury due his rank. The land along the shore of the 
river was usually well timbered, and in the level 
openings looked as fertile as might be expected of an 
alluvial first bottom frequently overflowed. At its 
junction with the Columbia the "Willamette is about 
three quarters of a mile in width, and the Columbia 
may be half a mile wider, though at first sight the 
difierence seems more than that from the tributary's 
entering the main river at an acute angle, and giv- 
ing a diagonal view to the opposite shore. Before 
we passed into the Columbia, we had from the upper 
deck a magnificent glimpse to the eastward of Hood's 
spotless snow-cone rosied with the reflection of the 
dying sunset. Short and hurried as it was, this view 
of Mount Hood was unsurpassed for beauty by any 
which we got in its close vicinity and afterward, 
though nearness added rugged grandeur to the sight. 
Six miles' sail between low and uninteresting shores 
brought us from the mouth of the "Willamette to Fort 
Vancouver, on the "Washington Territory side of the 
river. Here we debarked for the night, making our 
way in an ambulance sent for us from the post, a 
distance of two minutes' ride, to the quarters of Gen- 
eral Alvord, the commandant. Under his hospitable 
roof we experienced, for the first time in several 
months and many hundred miles, the delicious sensa- 
tion of a family dinner, with a refined lady at the 
head of the table and well-bred children about the 
sides. A very interesting guest of General Alvord's 
was Major Lugenbeel, who had spent his life in the 
topographical service of the United States, and com- 
bined the culture of a student with an amount of 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 479 

information concerning the wildest portions of our 
Continent which I have never seen surpassed nor 
heard communicated in style more fascinating. He 
had lately come from the John Day, Boise, and Snake 
River Mines, where the Government was surveying 
routes of emigration, and pronounced the wealth of 
the region exhaustless. 

After a pleasant evening and a good night's rest, 
we took the Oregon Company's steamer, "Wilson G. 
Hunt," and proceeded up the river, leaving Fort Van- 
couver about seven a. m. To our surprise, the " Hunt" 
proved an old acquaintance. She will be remembered 
by most people who during the last twelve years 
have been familiar with the steamers hailing from 
New York Bay. Though originally built for river 
service such as now employs her, she came around 
from the Hudson to the Columbia by way of Cape 
Horn. By lessening her top-hamper and getting new 
stanchions for her perilous voyage, she performed it 
without accident. 

Such a vivid souvenir of the Hudson reminded me 
of an assertion I had often heard, that the Columbia 
resembles it. There is some ground for the compari- 
son. Each of the rivers breaks through a noble 
mountain-system in its passage to the sea, and the 
walls of its avenue are correspondingly grand. In 
point of variety the banks of the Hudson far surpass 
those of the Columbia, — trap, sandstone, granite, 
limestone, and slate succeeding each other with a 
rapidity which presents ever new outlines to the eye 
of the tourist. The scenery of the Columbia, between 
Fort Vancouver and the Dalles, is a sublime mono- 
tone. Its banks are basaltic crags or mist -wrapt 
domes, averaging below the cataract from twelve to 



480 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

fifteen hundred feet in height, and thence decreasing 
to the Dalles, where the escarpments, washed by the 
river, are low trap bluffs on a level with the steamer's 
walking-beam, and the mountains have retired, bare 
and brown, like those of the great continental basin 
farther south, toward Mount Hood in that direction, 
and Mount Adams on the north. If the Palisades 
were quintupled in height, domed instead of level on 
their upper surfaces, extended up the whole naviga- 
ble course of the Hudson, and were thickly clad with 
evergreens wherever they were not absolutely pre- 
cipitous, the Hudson would much more closely re- 
semble the Columbia. 

I was reminded of another Eastern river, which I 
had never heard mentioned in the same company. 
As we ascended toward the cataract, the Columbia 
water assumed a green tint as deep and positive as 
that of the Niagara between the falls and Lake On- 
tario. Save that its surface was not so perturbed 
with eddies and marbled with foam, it resembled the 
Niagara perfectly. 

We boarded the " Hunt " in a dense fog, and went 
immediately to breakfast. With our last cup of coffee 
the fog cleared away and showed us a sunny vista up 
the river, bordered by the columnar and mural trap 
formations above mentioned, with an occasional bold 
promontory jutting out beyond the general face of 
the precipice, its shaggy fell of pines and firs all 
aflood with sunshine to the very crown. The finest 
of these promontories was called Cape Horn, the 
river bending around it to the northeast. The chan- 
nel kept mid-stream with considerable uniformity, — 
but now and then, as in the highland region of the 
Hudson, made a detour to avoid some bare, rocky isl- 



ON THE COLUMBIA EIVER. 481 

and. Several of these islands were quite columnar, 
— being evidently the emerged capitals of basaltic 
prisms, like the other uplifts on the banks. A fine 
instance of this formation was the stately and per- 
pendicular " Rooster Rock " on the Oregon side, but 
not far from Cape Horn. Still another was called 
" Lone Rock," and rose from the middle of the river. 
These came upon our view within the first hour after 
breakfast, in company with a slender, but graceful 
stream, which fell into the river over a sheer wall of 
basalt seven hundred feet in height. This little cas- 
cade reminded us of Po-ho-no, or The Bridal Veil, 
near the lower entrance of the Great Yo-Semite. 

As the steamer rounded a point into each new 
stretch of silent, green, and sunny river, we sent a 
flock of geese or ducks hurrying cloudward or shore- 
ward. Here, too, for the first time in a state of abso- 
lute Nature, I saw that royal bird, the swan, escorting 
his mate and cygnets on an airing or a luncheon-tour. 
It was a beautiful sight, though I must confess that 
his Majesty and all the royal family are improved by 
civilization. One of the great benefits of civilization 
is, that it restricts its subjects to doing what they can 
do best. Park-swans seldom fly, — and flying is some- 
thing that swans should never attempt, unless they 
wish to be taken for geese. I felt actually desiUiisionne, 
when a princely cortege, which had been rippling their 
snowy necks in the sunshine, clumsily lifted them- 
selves out of the water and slanted into the clouds, 
stretching those necks straight as a gun-barrel. Ev- 
ery line of grace seemed wire-drawn out of them in 
a moment. Song is as little their forte as flight, — 
barring the poetic license open to moribund members 
of their family, — and I must confess, that, if this 

31 



482 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

privilege indicate approaching dissolution, the most 
intimate friends of the specimens we heard have no 
cause for apprehension. An Adirondack loon fortify- 
ing his utterance by a cracked fish-horn is the near- 
est approach to a healthy swan-song. On the whole, 
the wild swan cannot afford to '• pause in his cloud " 
for all the encomiums of Mr. Tennyson, and had better 
come down immediately to the dreamy water-level, 
where he floats dream within dream, like a stable 
vapor in a tangible sky. Anywhere else he seems a 
court-beauty wandering into metaphysics. 

Alternating with these swimmers came occasional 
flocks of shag, a bird belonging to the cormorant 
tribe, and here and there a gull, though these last 
grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. 
I was surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the 
channel, twenty miles above Fort Vancouver, but 
learned that it was not unusual for these animals to 
ascend nearly to the cataract. Both the whites and 
Indians scattered along the river banks kill them for 
their skin and blubber, — going out in boats for the 
purpose. My informant's boat had on one occasion 
taken an old seal nursino: her calf When the dam 
was towed to shore, the young one followed her, 
occasionally putting its fore-flippers on the gunwale 
to rest, like a Newfoundland dog, and behaving with 
such innocent familiarity that malice was disarmed. 
It came ashore with the boat's-crew and the body of 
its parent ; no one had the heart to drive it away ; 
so it stayed and was a pet of the camp from that 
time forward. After a while the party moved its 
position a distance of several miles while Jack was 
away in the river on a fishing excursion, but there 
was no eluding him. The morning after the shift he 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVEE. 483 

came wagging into camp, a faithful and much over- 
joyed, but exceedingly battered and used-up seal. 
He had evidently sought his friends by rock and 
flood the entire night preceding. 

Occasionally the lonely river-stretches caught a 
sudden human interest in some gracefully modeled 
canoe gliding out with a crew of Chinook Indians 
from the shadow of a giant promontory, propelled 
by a square sail learned of the whites. Knowing the 
natural, ingrained laziness of Indians, one can imag- 
ine the delight with which they comprehended that 
substitute for the paddle. After all, this may per- 
haps be an ill-natured thing to say. Who does like 
to drudge when he can help it ? Is not this very 
" Wilson G. Hunt " a triumph of human laziness, vindi- 
cating its claim to be the lord of matter by an inge- 
nuity doing labor's utmost without sweat ? After all, 
nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that 
he may presently stop drudging. 

At short intervals along the narrow strip of shore 
under the more gradual steeps, on the lower ledges 
of the basaltic precipices, and on little rock-islands 
in the river, appeared rude-looking stacks and scaf- 
foldings where the Indians had packed their salmon. 
They left it in the open air without guard, as fearless 
of robbers as if the fish did not constitute their al- 
most entire subsistence for the winter. And within 
their own tribes they have justification for this fear- 
lessness. Their standard of honor is in most respects 
curiously adjustable, — but here virtue is defended by 
the necessities of life. 

In the immediate vicinity of the cured article (I 
say " cured," though the process is a mere drying 
without smoke or salt) may be seen the apparatus 



484 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

contrived for getting it in the fresh state. This is 
the scaffolding from which the salmon are caught. 
It is a horizontal platform shaped like a capital A, 
erected upon a similarly framed, but perpendicular 
set of braces, with a projection of several feet over 
the river brink at a place where the water runs rap- 
idly close in-shore. If practicable, the constructor 
modifies his current artificially, banking it inward 
with large stones, so as to form a sort of sluice in 
which passing fish will be more completely at his 
mercy. At the season of their periodic ascent, sal- 
mon swarm in all the rivers of our Pacific coast ; the 
Columbia and Willamette are alive with them for a 
long distance above the cascades of the one and the 
Oregon City Fall of the other. The fisherman stands, 
nearly or quite naked, at the edge of his scaffolding, 
armed with a net extended at the end of a long pole, 
and so ingeniously contrived that the weight of the 
salmon and a little dexterous management draw its 
mouth shut on the captive like a purse as soon as he 
has entered. A helper stands behind the fisherman 
to assist in raising the haul, — to give the fish a tap 
on the nose, which kills him instantly, — and finally 
to carry him ashore to be split and dried, without 
any danger of his throwing himself back into the 
water from the hands of his captors, as might easily 
happen by omitting the coup- de- grace. Another 
method of catching salmon, much in vogue among 
the Sacramento and Pitt River tribes, but apparently 
less employed by the Indians of the Columbia, is har- 
pooning with a very clever instrument constructed 
after this wise. A hard wood shaft is neatly, but not 
tightly, fitted into the socket of a sharp-barbed spear- 
head carved from bone. Through a hole drilled in 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIYER. 485 

the spear-head a stout cord of deer-sinew is fastened 
by one end, its other being secured to the shaft near 
its insertion. The salmon is struck by this weapon 
in the manner of the ordinary fish-spear ; the head 
sHps off the shaft as soon as the barbs lodge, and the 
harpoon virtually becomes a fishing-rod, with the 
sinew for a line. This arrangement is much more 
manageable than the common spear, as it greatly 
diminishes the chances of losing fish and breaking 
shafts. 

There can scarcely be a more sculpturesque sight 
than that of a finely formed, well-grown young Indian 
struggling on his scaffold with an unusually powerful 
fish. Every muscle of his wiry frame stands out in 
its turn in unveiled relief, and you see in him atti- 
tudes of grace and power which will not let you re- 
gret the '' Apollo Belvedere "pr the " Gladiator." The '•^} 
only pity is that this ideal Indian is a rare being. 
The Indians of this coast and river are divided into 
two broad classes, — the Fish Indians, and the Meat 
Indians. The latter, ceteris paribus, are much the 
finer race, derive the greater portion of their sub- 
sistence from the chase, and possess the athletic mind 
and body which result from active methods of win- 
ning a livelihood. The former are, to a great extent, 
victims of that generic and hereditary tabes mesenter- 
ica which produces the peculiar pot-bellied and spin- 
dle - shanked type of savage ; their manners are 
milder; their virtues and vices are done in water- 
color, as comports with their source of supply. There 
are some tribes which partake of the habits of both 
classes, living in mountain-fastnesses part of the year 
by the bow and arrow, but coming down to the river 
in the salmon-season for an addition to their winter 



486 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

bill-of-fare. Anywhere rather than among the pure 
Fish Indians is the place to look for savage beauty. 
Still these tribes have fortified their feebleness by 
such a cultivation of their ingenuity as surprises one 
seeing for the first time their well-adapted tools, com- 
fortable lodges, and, in some cases, really beautiful 
canoes. In the last respect, however, the Indians 
nearer the coast surpass those up the Columbia, — 
some of their carved and painted canoes equaling 
the " crackest " of shell-boats in elegance of line and 
beauty of ornament. 

In a former chapter devoted to the Great Yo-Sem- 
ite I had occasion to remark that Indian legend, like 
all ancient poetry, often contains a scientific truth 
embalmed in the spices of metaphor, — or, to vary 
the figure, that Mudjekeewis stands holding the lan- 
tern for Agassiz and Dana to dig by. 

Coming to the Falls of the Columbia, we find a case 
in point. Nearly equidistant from the longitudes of 
Fort Vancouver and Mount Hood, the entire Colum- 
bia River falls twenty feet over a perpendicular wall 
of basalt, extending, with minor deviations from the 
right angle, entirely between-shores, a breadth of 
about a mile. The height of Niagara and the close 
compression of its vast volume make it a grander 
sio-ht than the Falls of the Columbia, — but no other 
cataract known to me on this Continent rivals it for 
an instant. The great American Falls of Snake are 
much loftier and more savage than either, but their 
volume is so much less as to counterbalance those 
advantages. Taking the Falls of the Columbia all 
in all, — including their upper and lower rapids, — 
it must be confessed that they exhibit every phase 
af tormented water in its beauty of color or grace of 
form, its wrath or its whim. 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVEK. 487 

The Indians have a tradition that the river once 
followed a uniform level from the Dalles to the sea. 
This tradition states that Mounts Hood and St. Hel- 
en's are husband and wife, — whereby is intended 
that their tutelar divinities stand in that mutual re- 
lation ; that in comparatively recent times there ex- 
isted a rocky bridge across the Columbia at the 
present site of the cataract, and that across this 
bridge Hood and St. Helen's were wont to pass for 
interchange of visits ; that, while this bridge existed, 
there was a free subterraneous passage under it for 
the river and the canoes of the tribes (indeed, this 
tradition is so universally credited as to stagger the 
skeptic by a mere calculation of chances) ; that, on a 
certain occasion, the mountainous pair, like others 
not mountainous, came to high w^ords, and during 
their altercation broke the bridge down ; falling into 
the river, this colossal Rialto became a dam, and ever 
since that day the upper river has been backed to its 
present level, submerging vast tracts of country far 
above its original bed. 

I notice that excellent geological authorities are 
willing to treat this legend respectfully, as contain- 
ing in symbols the probable key to the natural phe- 
nomena. Whether the original course of the Columbia 
at this place was through a narrow canon or under an 
actual roof of rock, the adjacent material has been at 
no very remote date toppled into it to make the cata- 
ract, and alter the bed to its present level. Both 
Hood and St. Helen's are volcanic cones. The latter 
has been seen to smoke within the last twelve years. 
It is not unlikely that during the last few centuries 
some intestine disturbance may have occurred along 
the axis between the two, sufficient to account for 



4SS THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

the precipitation of that mass of rock which now 
forms the dam. That we cannot refer the cataclysm 
to a very ancient date seems to be argued by the 
state of preservation in which we still find the stumps 
of the celebrated " submerged forest," extending a 
long distance up the river above the Falls. 

At the foot of the cataract we landed from the 
steamer on the Washington side of the river, and 
found a railroad train waiting to do our portage. It 
was a strange feeling, that of whirling along by steam 
where so few years before the Indian and the trader 
had toiled through the virgin forest, bending under 
the weight of their canoes. And this is one of the 
characteristic surprises of American scenery every- 
where. You cannot isolate yourself from the national 
civilization. In a Swiss chalet you may escape from 
all memories of Geneva; among the Grampians you 
find an entirely different set of ideas from those of 
Edinburgh: but the same enterprise which makes 
itself felt in New York and Boston starts up for your 
astonishment out of all the flxstnesses of the Conti- 
nent. Virgin Nature wooes our civilization to wed 
her, and no obstacles can conquer the American fasci- 
nation. In our journey through the wildest parts of 
this country, we were perpetually finding patent 
washing-machines among the chaparral, — canned 
fruit in the desert, — Voigtlander's field-glasses on 
the snow-peak, — lemon -soda in the canon, — men 
who were sure a railroad would be run by their cabin 
within ten years, in every spot where such a surprise 
was most remarkable. 

The portage road is six miles in length, leading 
nearly all the way close along the edge of the North 
Bluff, which, owing to a recession of the mountains, 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 489 

seems here only from fifty to eighty feet in height. 
From the windows of the train we enjoyed an almost 
uninterrupted view of the rapids, which are only less 
grand and forceful in their impression than those 
above Niagara. They are broken up into narrow 
channels by numerous bold and naked islands of trap. 
Through these the water roars, boils, and, striking 
projections, spouts upward in jets whose plumy top 
blows off in sheets of spray. It is tormented into 
whirlpools ; it is combed into fine threads, and strays 
whitely over a rugged ledge like old men's hair ; it 
takes all curves of grace and arrow-flights of force ; 
it is water doing all that water can do or be made to 
do. The painter who spent a year in making studies 
of it would not throw his time away ; when he had 
finished, he could not misrepresent water under any 
phases. 

At the upper end of the portage road we found 
another and smaller steamer awaiting us, with equally 
kind provision for our comfort made by the Com- 
pany and the captain. In both steamers we were ac- 
corded excellent opportunities for drawing and obser- 
vation, getting seats in the pilot-house. 

Above the rapids the river banks were bold and 
rocky. The stream changed from its recent Niagara 
green to a brown like that of the Hudson ; and un- 
der its waters, as we hugged the Oregon side, could 
be seen a submerged alluvial plateau, studded thick 
with drowned stumps, here and there lifting their 
splintered tops above the water, and measuring from 
the diameter of a sapling to that of a trunk which 
might once have been one hundred feet high. 

Between Fort Vancouver and the cataract the 
banks of the river seem nearly as wild as on the day 



490 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

they were discovered by the whites. On neither the 
Oregon nor the Washington side is there any settle- 
ment visible, — a small wood- wharf, or the temporary 
hut of a salmon-fisher, being the only sign of human 
possession. At the Falls we noticed a single white 
house standing in a commanding position high up on 
the wooded ledges of the Oregon shore ; and the taste 
shown in placing and constructing it was worthy of a 
Hudson River landholder. This is, perhaps, the first 
attempt at a distinct country residence made in Ore- 
gon, and belongs to a Mr. Olmstead, who was one of 
the earliest settlers and projectors of public improve- 
ments in the State. He was actively engaged in the 
building of the first portage railroad, which ran on 
the Oregon side. The entire interests of both have, 
I believe, been concentrated in the newer one ; and 
the Oregon road, after building itself by feats of busi- 
ness energy and ingenuity known only tp American 
pioneer enterprise, has fallen into entire or compara- 
tive disuse. 

Above the Falls we found as unsettled a river 
margin as below. Occasionally, some bright spot of 
color attracted us, relieved against the walls of trap 
or glacis of evergreen ; and this upon nearer approach, 
or by the glass, was resolved into a group of river In- 
dians, — part with the curiously compressed foreheads 
of the Flat-head tribe, their serene nakedness draped 
with blankets of every variety of hue, from fresh 
flaming red to weather-beaten army blue, and adorned 
as to their cheeks with smutches of the cinnabar- 
rouge which from time immemorial has been a prime 
article of import among the fashionable native circles 
of the Columbia, — the other part round-headed, and 
(I have no doubt it appears a perfect sequitur to the 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 491 

Flat-head conservatives) therefore slaves. The cap- 
tive in battle seems more economically treated among 
these savages than is common anywhere else in the 
Indian regions we traversed (though I suppose sla- 
very is to some extent universal throughout the 
tribes), — the captors properly arguing that so long 
as they can make a man fish and boil jDot for them, it 
is a very foolish waste of material to kill him. 

At intervals above the Falls we passed several small 
islands of special interest as being the cemeteries of 
river tribes. The principal, called "Mimitus," was 
sacred as the resting-place of a very noted chief 
I have forgotten his name. The deceased is en- 
tombed like a person of quality, in a wooden mauso- 
leum having something the appearance of a log-cabin, 
upon which pains have been expended, and contain- 
ing, with the human remains, robes, weapons, baskets, 
canoes, and all the furniture of Indian menage^ to an 
extent which among the tribes amounts to a fortune. 
This sepulchral idea is a clear-headed one, and worthy 
of Eastern adoption. Old ladies with lace and nieces, 
old gentlemen with cellars and nephews, might be 
certain that the solace which they received in life's 
decline was purely disinterested, if about middle age 
they should announce that their Point and their Port 
w^ere going to Mount Auburn with them. 

The river grew narrower, its banks becoming low, 
perpendicular walls of basalt, water-worn at the base, 
squarely cut and castellated at the top, and bare 
everywhere as any pile of masonry. The hills beyond 
became naked, or covered only with short grass of 
the gramma kind and dusty-gray sage brush. Simul- 
taneously they lost some of their previous basaltic 
characteristics, running into more convex outlines, 



492 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

which receded from the river. "We could not fail to 
recognize the fact that we had crossed one of the 
great thresholds of the Continent, — were once more 
east of the Sierra Nevada axis, and in the great cen- 
tral plateau which a few months previous, and several 
hundred miles farther south, we had crossed amid so 
many pains and perils by the Desert route to Washoe. 
From the grizzly mountains before us to the sources 
of the Snake Fork stretched an almost uninterrupted 
wilderness of sage. The change in passing to this 
region from the fertile and timbered tracts of the 
Cascades and the coast is more abrupt than can be 
imagined by one familiar with our delicately modu- 
lated Eastern scenery. This sharpness of definition 
seems to characterize the entire border of the pla- 
teau. Five hours of travel between Washoe and 
Sacramento carry one out of the nakedest stone heap 
into the grandest forest of the Continent. 

As we emerged from the confinement of the nearer 
ranges. Mount Hood, hitherto visible only through 
occasional rifts, loomed broadly into sight almost from 
base to peak, covered with a mantle of perennial 
snow scarcely less complete to our near inspection 
than it had seemed from our observatory south of 
Salem. Only here and there toward its lower rim a 
tatter in it revealed the giant's rugged brown muscle 
of volcanic rock. The top of the mountain, like that 
of Shasta, in direct sunlight is an opal. So far above 
the line of thaw, the snow seems to have accumu- 
lated until by its own weight it has condensed into a 
more compactly crystalline structure than ice itself; 
and the reflections from it, as I stated of Shasta, seem 
rather emanations from some interior source of light. 
The look is distinctly opaline, or, as a poet has called 
the opal, like " a pearl with a soul in it." 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 493 

About five o'clock in the afternoon we reached the 
Oregon town and mining-depot of Dalles City. A 
glance at any good War Department map of Oregon 
and Washington Territories will explain the impor- 
tance of this place, where considerably previous to 
the foundation of the present large and growing set- 
tlement there existed a fort and trading-post of the 
same name. It stands, as we have said, at the en- 
trance to the great pass by which the Columbia breaks 
throusfh the mountains to the sea. Just west of it oc- 
curs an interruption to the navigation of the river^ 
practically as formidable as the first cataract. This is 
the upper rapids and "the Dalles" proper, — pres- 
ently to be described in detail. The position of the 
town, at one end of a principal portage, and at the 
easiest door to the Pacific, renders it a natural entre- 
pot between the latter and the great central plateau 
of the Continent. This it must have been in any 
case for fur-traders and emigrants, but its business 
has been vastly increased by the discovery of that 
immense mining area distributed along the Snake 
Kiver and its tributaries as far east as the Rocky 
Mountains. The John Day, Boise, and numerous 
other tracts both in Washington and Idaho Territo- 
ries draw most of their supplies from this entrepot, 
and their gold comes down to it either for direct use 
in the outfit market, or to be passed down the river 
to Portland and the San Francisco mint. 

I do not lay particular stress upon the mines of 
Washington and Idaho as sources of profit to the 
Pacific Railroad. This is for the reason that the 
Snake River seems the proper outlet to much of the 
auriferous region, and this route may be susceptible 
of improvement by an alternation of portages, roads, 



494 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

and water-levels, which for a long tnne to come will 
form a means of communication more economical and 
rapid than a branch to the Pacific Road. The north- 
ern mines east of the Rocky range will find them- 
selves occupying somewhat similar relations to the 
Missouri River, Avhich rises, as one might almost say, 
out of the same spring as the Snake, — certainly out 
of the sam'e ridge of the Rocky Mountains. 

"The Dalles" is a town of one street, built close 
along the edge of a bluff of trap thirty or forty feet 
high, perfectly perpendicular, level on the top as if 
it had been graded for a city, and with depth of wa- 
ter at its base for the heaviest draught boats on the 
river. In fact, the whole water-front is a natural 
quay, — which wants nothing but time to make it 
alive with steam-elevators, warehouses, and derricks. 
To Portland and the Columbia it stands much as St. 
Louis to New Orleans and the Mississippi. There is no 
reason why it should not some day have a correspond- 
ing business, for whose wharfage accommodation it has 
even greater natural advantages. 

Architecturally, the Dalles cannot be said to lean 
very heavily on the side of beauty. The houses are 
mostly two-story structures of wood, occupied by all 
the trades and professions which flock to a new min- 
ing entrepot. Outfit merchants, blacksmiths, printing- 
office (for there is really a very well-conducted daily 
at the Dalles), are cheek by jowl with doctors, tailors, 
and Cheap Johns, — the latter being only less merry 
and thrifty over their incredible sacrifices in every- 
thing, from pins to corduroy, than that predominant 
class of all, the bar-keepers themselves. The town 
was in a state of bustle when our steamer touched 
the wharf; it bustled more and more from there to 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 495 

the Umatilla House, where we stopped ; the hotel 
was one organized bustle in bar and dining room ; 
and bed-time brought no hush. The Dalles, like the 
Irishman, seemed sitting up all night to be fresh for 
an early start in the morning. 

We found everybody interested in gold. . Crowds 
of listeners, with looks of incredulity or enthusiasm, 
were gathered around the party in the bar-room which 
had last come in from the newest of the new mines, 
and a man who had seen the late Fort Hall discoveries 
was " treated " to that extent that he might have be- 
come intoxicated a dozen times without expense to 
himself. The charms of the interior were still further 
suggested by placards posted on every wall, offering 
rewards for the capture of a person who on the great 
gold route had lately committed some of the grim- 
mest murders and most talented robberies known in 
any branch of Newgate enterprise. I had for supper 
a very good omelet (considering its distance from the 
culinary centres of the universe), and a Dalles edito- 
rial debating the claims of several noted cut-throats 
to the credit of the operations ascribed to them, — 
feeling that in the ensemble I was enjoying both the 
exotic and the indigenous luxuries of our virgin soil. 

After supper and a stroll I returned to the ladies' 
parlor of the Umatilla House, rubbed my eyes in vain 
to dispel the illusion of a piano and a carpet at this 
jumping-off place of civilization, and sat down at a 
handsome centre-table to write up my journal. I had 
reviewed my way from Portland as far as Fort Van- 
couver, when another illusion happened to me in the 
shape of a party of gentlemen and ladies, in ball- 
dresses, dress-coats, white kids, and elaborate hair, 
who entered the parlor to wait for further accessions 



496 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

from the hotel. They were on their way with a band 
of music to give some popular citizen a surprise 
party. The popular citizen never got the fine edge 
of that surprise. I took it off for him. If it were 
not too much like a little Cockney on Vancouver's 
Island who used the phrase on all occasions, from 
stubbing his toe to the death of a Cabinet Lord, I 
should say, "I never was more astonished in me 
life!". 

None of them had ever seen me before, — and with 
my books and maps about me, I may have looked like 
some public, yet mysterious character. I felt a pleas- 
ant sensation of having interest taken in me, and, 
wishing to make an ingenuous return, looked up with 
a casual smile at one of the party. Again to my sur- 
prise, this proved to be a very charming young lady, 
and I timidly became aware that the others were 
equally pretty in their several styles. Not knowing 
what else to do under the circumstances, I smiled 
again, still more casually. An equal uncertainty as 
to alternative set the ladies smiling quite across the 
row, and then, to my relief, the gentlemen joined 
them, making it pleasant for us all. A moment later 
we were engaged in general conversation, — starting 
from the bold hypothesis, thrown out by one of the 
gentlemen, that perhaps I was going to Boise, and 
proceeding, by a process of elimination, to the accu- 
rate knowledge of what I was going to do, if it 
wasn't that. I enjoyed one of the most cheerful bits 
of social relaxation I had found since crossing the 
Missouri; and nothing but my duty to my journal 
prevented me, when my surprise party left, from ac- 
companying them, by invitation, under the brevet 
title of Professor, to the house of the popular citizen, 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 497 

who, I was assured, would be glad to see me. I cer- 
tainly should have been glad to see him, if he was 
anything like those guests of his who had so ingenu- 
ously cultivated me in a far land of strangers, where 
a man might have been glad to form the acquaint- 
ance of his mother-in-law. This is not the way peo- 
ple form acquaintances in New York ; but if I had 
wanted that, why not have stayed there ? As a cos- 
mopolite, and on general principles of being, I prefer 
the Dalles way. I have no doubt I should have found 
in that circle of spontaneous recognitions quite as 
many people who stood wear and improved on inti- 
macy as were ever vouchsafed to me by social in- 
dorsement from somebody else. "We are perpetually 
blaming our heads of Government bureaus for their 
poor knowledge of character, — their subordinates, 
we say, are never pegs in the right holes. If we un- 
derstood our civilized system of introductions, we 
could not rationally expect anything else. The great 
mass of polite mankind are trained not to know char- 
acter, but to take somebody else's voucher for it. 
Their acquaintances, most of their friendships, come 
to them through a succession of indorsers, none of 
whom may have known anything of the goodness of 
the paper. A sensible man, conventionally introduced 
to his fellow, must always wonder why the latter does 
not turn him around to look for signatures in chalk 
down the back of his coat ; for he knows that Brown 
indorsed him over to Jones, and Jones negotiated him 
with Robinson, through a succession in which perhaps 
two out of a hundred took pains to know whether he 
represented metal. You do not find the people of new 
countries making mistakes in character. Every man 
is his own guaranty, — and if he has no just cause to 

32 



498 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

suspect himself bogus, there will be true pleasure in 
a frank opening of himself to the examination and 
his eyes for the study of others. Not to be accused 
of intruding radical reform under the guise of belles- 
lettres, let me say that I have no intention of intro- 
ducing this innovation at the East. 

In the afternoon of the next day we were provided, 
by the courtesy of the Company, with a special train 
on the portage railroad connecting Dalles City with a 
station known as Celilo. This road had but recently 
come into full operation, and was now doing an im- 
mense freight business between the two river levels 
separated by the intervening " Dalles." It seemed 
somewhat longer than the road around the Falls. Its 
exact length has escaped me, but I think it about 
eight or nine miles. 

With several officers of the road, who vied in giv- 
ing us opportunities of comfort and information, we 
set out, about three p. m., from a station on the water- 
front below the town, whence we trundled through 
the long main street, and were presently shot forth 
upon a wilderness of sand. An occasional trap uplift 
rose on our right, but, as we were on the same bluff 
level as Dalles City, we met no lofty precipices. We 
were constantly in view of the river, separated from 
its Oregon brink at the farthest by about half a mile 
of the dreariest dunes of shifting sand ever seen by 
an amateur in deserts. The most arid tracts along 
the Platte could not rival this. The wind was vio- 
lent when we left Dalles City, and possessed the novel 
faculty of blowing simultaneously from all points of 
the compass. It increased with every mile of ad- 
vance, both in force and faculty, until at Celilo we 
found it a hurricane. The gentlemen of the Com- 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVEK. 499 

pany who attended us, told us, as seemed very credi- 
ble, that the highest winds blowing here (compared 
with which the present might be styled a zephyr) 
banked the track so completely out of sight with sand 
that a large force of men had to be steadily employed 
in shoveling out trains that had been brought to a 
dead halt, and clearing a way for the slow advance 
of others. I observed that the sides of some of the 
worst sand-cuts had been planked over to prevent 
their sliding down upon the road. Occasionally, the 
sand blew in such tempests as to sift through every 
cranny of the cars, and hide the river glimpses like a 
momentary fog. But this discomfort was abundantly 
compensated by the wonderfully interesting scenery 
on the Columbia side of our train. 

The river for the whole distance of the portage is 
a succession of magnificent rapids, low cataracts, and 
narrow, sinuous channels, — the last known to the 
old French traders as " Dales " or "Troughs," and to 
us by the very natural corruption of " Dalles." The 
alternation between these phases is wonderfully ab- 
rupt. At one point, about half-way between Dalles 
City and Celilo, the entire volume of the Columbia 
River (and how vast that is may be better under- 
stood by following up on the map the river itself 
and all its tributaries) is crowded over upon the Ore- 
gon shore through a passage not more than fifty 
yards in width, between perfectly naked and perpen- 
dicular precipices of basalt. Just beyond this mighty 
mill-race, where one of the grandest floods of the 
Continent is sliding in olive-green light and umber 
shadow, smoothly and resistlessly as time, the river 
is a mile wide, and plunges over a ragged wall of 
trap blocks, reaching, as at the lower cataract, from 



500 THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT. 

shore to shore. In other neighboring places it attains 
even a greater width, but up to Celilo is never out of 
torment from the obstructions of its bed. Not even 
the rapids of Niagara can vie with these in their im- 
pression of power; and only the Columbia itself can 
describe the lines of grace made by its water, rasped 
to spray, churned to froth, tired into languid sheets 
that flow like sliding glass, or shot up in fountains 
frayed away to rainbows on their edges, as it strikes 
some basalt hexagon rising in mid-stream. The Dalles 
and the Upper Cataracts are still another region where 
the artist might stay for a year's University course in 
water-painting. 

At Celilo we found several steamers, in register 
resembling our second of the day previous. They 
measured on the average about three hundred tons. 
One of them had just got down from Walla Walla, 
with a large party of miners from gold tracts still 
further off, taking down five hundred thousand dol- 
lars in dust to Portland and San Francisco. We were 
very anxious to accept the Company's extended invi- 
tation, and push our investigations to or even up the 
Snake Eiver. But the expectation that the San Fran- 
cisco steamer would reach Portland in a day or two, 
and that we should immediately return by her to 
California, turned us most reluctantly down the river, 
after we had made the fullest notes and sketches at- 
tainable. Bad weather on the coast falsified our ex- 
pectations. For a week we were rain-bound in Port- 
land, unable to leave our hotel for an hour at a time 
without being drenched by the floods, which just now 
set in for the winter season, and regretting the lack 
of that prescience which would have enabled us to 
accomplish one of the most interesting side-trips in 



ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 501 

our whole plan of travel. While this pleasure still 
awaited us, and none in particular of any kind seemed 
present save the in-door courtesies of our Portland 
friends, it was still among the memories of a life-time 
to have seen the Columbia in its Cataracts and its 
Dalles. 



APPEE-DIX. 



UTAH'S LIFE PRINCIPLE AND DESTINY. 

The great ecclesiastical glory of Mormonism is to be tlie Temple. This 
is now in process of erection, but the work is pushed very slowly — prob- 
ably with a view to the greater soundness of its foundations, as the other 
reasons common in such cases, lack of money and of labor, can hardly be 
operative here, — the Church being enormously wealthy, able to control 
the time of all its disciples, and blessed with a male membership whose 
large majority is used to physical labor. 

The basement of the Temple, as I learned from a Mormon builder, was 
excavated several years ago, and its foundations partly laid, when Brigham 
Young discovered in the work something which dissatisfied him, and had 
it leveled to the ground. The foundations are now well up once more, 
and the gigantic ashlars are steadily coming in from their quarry in the 
canons. The stone used is a handsome compact granite, like the Quincy, 
but even whiter, and in the more ornamental parts of the superstructure 
will be associated with marble, and that magnificent crystalline limestone, 
traversed by veins of pure calc-spar, which, in almost every direction 
around Salt Lake, is found adjoining the metamorphic strata. 

The City is laid out in the shape of an L, whose upright points north and 
south. " Temple Block " is situated nearly in the inner angle of this L. 
On the east Brigham Young's, or " the Prophet's " block, adjoins it, 
with a street intervtoing. Heber Kimball's stands corner to corner with 
it, just north of Brigham's. That of George Smith (the original prophet's 
cousin, and keeper of the sacred archives) is on the west of it. Across 
the street, on the south of it, is the Council House Block. On the south- 
east is the block occupied by Mr. Wells, one of the chief apostles, and 
third of the three presidents, Brigham and Heber 1 being the others; the 
History Office is also on the same. 

The Temple Block is 660 feet square, its lines running due north, 
south, east, and west, its front being on the east The front line of the 
Temple is 78 feet 3 inches from the east line of the block ; the length of 
the building, including towers and pedestal, will be 186^ feet, and its 
width 118^ feet. I was very much surprised when I learned how compara- 
tively insignificant were the dimensions of a building intended to be the 
external symbol of God's abode among men, and the architectural glory 
of a people whose sectarian belief is so closely identified with its national 

1 Written before Heber's death. With this understanding none of the essential 
statements are affected. 



604 APPENDIX. 

life as the Mormons. The foundation walls, where they reach the surface 
of the ground, are 1 6 feet wide. From the surface they slope 3 feet 
on each side to the height of 7^ feet, having thus on their upper surface 
a width of 10 feet. On this base begins the true wall, which is 8 feet 
thick. Measuring from outside to outside of the north and south wall, the 
width of the body of the building will be but 99 feet — the larger measure- 
ment given above including the towers, which stand at each end of the 
east and west side. Beside these towers at the corners, there are two 
others, at the centre of the east and west sides respectively. Each of 
these towers has pedestals of the same form and proportions as the wall, 
built of immense rough ashlars laid in lime mortar. Along the north and 
south sides of the Temple, between the towers, the earth will be sloped 
into a glacis, or terrace, 6 feet high above the general level of the block ; 
and on its upper surface will begin a promenade with a width varying 
from 11 to 22 feet, and reaching round the entire building, with stone 
steps leading up to it from the lower level at convenient intervals along 
the slope of the glacis. The towers on the four corners start from their 
footing of 26 feet square, continue to the height of 16^ feet, where they 
reach the line of the first string-course, and are reduced to 25 feet square. 
They continue thus 38 feet higher to the second string-course ; are then 
reduced to 23 feet square, and rise another distance of 38 feet to the third 
string-course. From this course the corner towers Ijecome cylindrical, 
with an interior diameter of 1 7 feet ; those on the east rising to the height 
of 25, and those on the west to a height of 19 feet, before they reach 
their own proper string-pieces, or cornices. From these cornices, on 
all four of them, rise battlements 9 feet high. The string-pieces, save 
where broken by buttresses, are continuous all round the building, and 
are massive mouldings from solid blocks of stone. Each of the corner 
towers has on each of its exposed sides two ornamental windows in their 
25 feet square section, two in the section 23 feet square, and one in the 
highest. The centre towers, on both the east and west ends, start 31 feet 
square, but are otherwise of the same proportions as the corner towers as 
high as the third string-piece. From that line the east centre tower rises 
40 feet to the top of its battlement, and the west centre tower 34 feet, — 
each being thus 6 feet higher than its adjoining corner towers. 

Each of the centre towers is, furthermore, crowned with a spire ; the 
spire of the east tower rising to the height of 200, and that of the 
west to 190 feet. All the towers are ornamented at the corners of each 
story with pinnacled turrets, and each side of the towers is flanked by a 
pair of buttresses. On the front of each centre tower are two windows, 
each 30 feet high, set one above the other. It is expected that these will 
rival the finest abbey and cathedral windows of the Old World. They 
■will be of the handsomest carved stone-work, with stained-glass panes ; 
and there are among the Mormons one or two artists in both these 
departments, whose talents, judging from small specimens of their work 



APPENDIX. 505 

which I saw, are really quite remarkable. It is the intention that all the 
labor and the art expended on the Temple shall be distinctly indigenous ; 
and the pride which Brigham takes in all home productions tends to the 
constant development of the very class of abilities needed for this result. 
The height of the ridge-pole of the Temple will be about 100 feet. 

The foundation of the building looks more like that of a fort than of a 
cathedral. Not only do the massive side walls, 16 feet thick below, 8 
feet above, contribute to this impression, but the partitions also, of enor- 
mous ashlars, by which the basement is separated into a multitude of 
rooms. In the centre of the area is the baptismal room, 59 feet long by 
35 feet wide, separated from the main north and south walls by four rooms, 
two on each side, each 19 feet long by 12 wide. On the east and west 
sides of these rooms are four passages, 12 feet wide; and still further east 
and west four more rooms, two at each end, 28 by 38J feet. These rooms 
are all 16^ feet high, and are to have elegantly ornamented and groined 
ceilings. 

From the basement, by stair-ways in the towers, we ascend to courts 16 
feet wide, running from tower to tower, and communicating by doors with 
all parts of the building. Out of the front or east court, a lofty door-way 
will enter the principal room of the Temple, 120 feet in length, 80 feet in 
width, and 38 feet in height to the crown of the ceiling. The ceiling is 
to be groined ; its arches, segments of an ellipse, resting upon columns 
based on the partition-walls below. These arches will meet in Ogive 
fashion at the centre, and be as profusely ornamented as possible by 
saintly artificers. The space outside of the columns supporting the arches, 
between them and the outer walls, will be divided into sixteen compart- 
ments, eight on each side, and 14 feet square, with a passage-way 6 feet 
wide, running along them the entire length of the building — each of these 
having in the outer wall (here 6 feet thick) a large elliptical window with 
the major axis perpendicular. 

The next story is to be precisely similar, except that the width of its 
large room will be one foot wider than that beneath it. 

The ornamentation of the building is intended to be symbolical of that 
employed on the celestial courts above. Its plan is already partially 
developed to Brigham by revelation through an angel, but will be com- 
municated in all its particulars only as required during the progress of 
the work. The ungodly understand this arrangement as synonymous 
among their own uninspired class with waiting to see how things will look ; 
but whatever they may say, I believe that Brother Brigham thinks he 
receives the plans from an angel. If it be really an angel, we must arrive 
at the painful conclusion that good taste is not necessarily included in 
that perfection of human nature which ensues on translation to the celes- 
tial state ; for such an architectural hotch-potch as that which I have just 
attempted to describe was certainly never seen on earth, and must render 
any part of heaven where it existed a very undesirable place of residence 



506 APPENDIX. 

to people of cultivation. Among the adornments which are to be executed 
on the exterior of the barbaric pile are the following, which I quote ti-om 
the architect's own account of his plan : — 

" On the two west corner towers, and on the west end, a few feet below 
the top of battlements, may be seen, in alto-relievo and bold relief, the 
Great Dipper, or Ursa Major, with the pointers ranging nearly toward 
the North Star. (Moral : The lost may find themselves by the priest- 
hood.) 

" The pedestals under all the buttresses project at their base 2 feet ; 
above their base, which is 15 inches by 4^ feet wide, on each front is a 
figiu-e of a globe 3 feet 11 inches across, whose axis corresponds with 
the axis of the earth. 

" Above the promenade, close under the second string-course on each 
of the buttresses, is the moon represented in its ditferent phases. Close 
under the third string-course or cornice is the face of the sun. Immedi- 
ately above is Saturn with his rings. 

" The only difference between the tower buttresses and the one just 
described is, instead of Saturn being on them, we have clouds and rays of 
light descending. 

" All of these symbols are to be chiseled in bass-relief on solid stone. 
The side walls continue above the string-course or cornice 8| feet, mak- 
ing the walls 96 feet high, and are formed in battlements interspersed 
with stars. 

" The whole house covers an area of 21,850 feet." 

While this portentous structure is getting ready to surprise, if not to 
scare, the nations, the Mormons residing in the City of Salt Lake worship 
in cool or cold weather at " The Tabernacle," and in the dog-days at 
" The Bowery." 

The Tabernacle is situated on the southwest corner of Temple Block. 
It is a building of the sun-dried bricks or adobe in such universal use 
thi-oughout the western half of the Continent, — having its principal 
entrance in the southern gable, which fronts on the same street as 
Brigham Young's. Its length is 1 26 feet, its width 64 ; and its height so 
disproportionately small as not only to give it a very squat appearance, 
which its absence of pretension and temporarincss of purpose make a 
matter of no consequence, but to render it almost stifling when the July 
sun pours down on it, — a matter which, to the 2,200 people whom it 
can seat at a pinch, is of very great consequence indeed. With the first 
extremely hot weather, therefore, Sunday religion moves its quarters to 
"The Bowery," a structure like the booths of the ancient Israelites, or, to 
descend for illustration into an atmosphere more recent and familiar, like 
the arbors which used to be in vogue at many of our sea-side watering- 
places, and are still to be seen fronting some hotels at Long Branch and 
at Fire Island — a scaffolding of rough tree trunks the diameter of a tele- 
graph pole set firmly in the ground, ten or twenty feet apart, braced 



APPENDIX. 507 

together by equally rough string-pieces at the top, and covered with 
successive layers of boughs green at first, but dried to parchment by the 
end of August, felted into each other, so to speak, until they are quite 
impervious to the sun. Rain in Utah there is but too little need of pro- 
viding against. The only " fair-weather Christian " must be a cool- 
weather one. The outer line of posts, in the Bowery, includes a nearly 
equilateral area of about 14,000 square feet, situated due north of the 
Tabernacle, and like it, on the Temple Block. I should judge it capable, 
without difficulty, of accommodating somewhere near 4,000 persons. 
Its seats are rude pine benches, some with backs, others backless, and 
provided, by the more luxurious members of the congregation, with hair 
or cornshuck cushions. On the inner posts hang kerosene lamps for use 
during the second Sunday service, which is held in the evening through 
the summer months at least, the afternoon being devoted to Sunday- 
school. A platform in length and breadth equaling the stage of a good- 
sized theatre, occupies about half of the northern side (the middle of the 
stage coinciding with the middle of the side), and affords rather more 
sumptuous seats than those of the auditorium (cane settees and chairs 
when I attended service) to a score or more of the principal men of 
Mormondom. The only approach to a pulpit is a plain drawing-room 
table, on which lie the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Latter-Day 
Saint's Hymn Book, flanked by a pitcher of water and a tumbler. 

On visiting the Bowery at the hour of beginning morning service, 
about half-past ten, as usual in most of our Eastern churches, I found the 
seats already well filled, but obtained a good position by the politeness of 
Brigham's son-in-law, Mr. Clawson. A pleasanter place to attend service 
in could hardly be imagined. The uninterrupted passage through the 
leafy covering of a delicious mountain breeze, whose edge, acquired by 
gliding over the hone of the perpetual snow, had been tempered just to a 
nicety by the sunshine of a cloudless summer sky, made fans entirely 
unnecessary ; and the liberty of the Gospel was broadly enough con- 
strued to admit of several bronzed agricultural saints near me sitting in 
the spotless freshness of snowy shirt-sleeves. The ladies were generally 
attired in airy muslin dresses without any over garment, except in a few 
scattered instances, where a black silk mantilla indicated some member of 
the Mormon aristocracy; and the children, who were present in large 
number, were, with striking good taste, dressed comfortably rather than 
ostentatiously — a course worthy of imitation at the East, and likely, if 
adopted, to increase greatly the number of youthful Christians who can 
say without hypocrisy, — 

" I have been there, and still would go : 
'Tis like a little heaven below." 

The stage was occupied by nine or ten dignitaries of the Church, among 
whom I recognized that stalwart pillar. Brother Heber, Dr. Bernhisel, 
and a very pleasant-looking man, a bishop, to whom I had been intro- 



508 APPENDIX.^ 

duced during the week. His name now escapes me, but I shall always 
recollect his face as expressing more genuine benevolence of nature, 
sincerity, and good sense than any I saw in Utah, except Brighara's. 

The exercises opened with a hymn given out by Dr. Bernhisel, and sung 
by the whole congregation with abundant fervor, under the leading of a 
small choir near the stage, accompanied by a melodeon and a violin. 
The tune was old familiar Ward, and in the words of the hymn was 
nothing which could shock the most fastidiously orthodox of Gentiles. 

Some of the hymns in the collection are very curious specimens of sa- 
cred and secular rapture commingled, as if the altar fire had been lighted 
with a coal from the kitchen-range of daily life. One, with which I 
became acquainted on another occasion, beginning " Upper California — 

! that's the land for me ! " (written in the early days of the Mormon 
exodus westward, when California included what is now Nevada, and the 
Mormons had founded several settlements along the Sierra), was sung to 
an adaptation of the ancient negro favorite, " O Susannah ! don't you cry 
for me," and contained a vivid description as well as eulogy of the agri- 
cultural blessings ensuing to immigrants. It sounded like a melodious 
prospectus of some new township, with religious and water privileges, the 
advantage of the Christians and the ten-acre lot treated in the same 
access of religious spasmody. One jumble particularly entertained me — it 
went something like this : — 

" Where the blessing of Jehovah is poured out on Jacob's line, 
And the mountains all are flowing with milk and honey, and saints and wine." 

1 am not sure that I quote the couplet precisely, except the last line, but 
that is correct, and the only part of consequence to the fun of the thing. 

After the hymn, the bishop of whom I have spoken made an extempore 
prayer. It was, as I should have expected, a plain, straightforward, hon- 
est-hearted appeal to the Divine Being for forgiveness of sins, and thanks- 
giving for the temporal blessings bestowed on the saintly community. At 
its conclusion, I was disappointed not to see Brigham rise to address us, 
but he had come in the week before from making an apostolic tour 
throughout the southern settlements, where he had averaged one speech 
a day, sbmetimes talking in the open air, and had a good excuse for rest- 
ing his voice to-day. Heber had been out too — accompanying Brother 
Brigham through his circuit, and playing Silas to his Paul everywhere. 
But Heber was a perfect Boanerges, as well as a Silas, and his thunder- 
ous utterances no more tired him than the work of keeping the small coal 
lively tires the leathern lungs which tradition makes it a part of his ear- 
lier manhood's career to have operated alternately with the sledge and 
cold chisel. He needed no rest, and accordingly gave us an address. 
This time it lacked one of those Heberistic characters which make his 
sermons as popular among the ungodly as Burton was in his best days — 
and popular after a fashion even still less congruous with Sunday and 



APPENDIX. 509 

sanctities than " Forty Winlcs " or the " Thousand Milliners." It was 
not indecent. I confess that I felt my curiosity disappointed while my 
good taste and ethical sense were relieved, for I had braced myself to 
stand any amount of deviation from the line usually followed by preachers, 
whether as regards subject selected or treatment employed. In his ])v\- 
vate conversation, as I had many occasions of noticing, Heber granted 
himself the largest latitude of reference to matters which are usually ta- 
booed, or, if mentioned of necessity, only behind the screen of friendship's 
most intimate privacy ; and of substituting for the euphuisms and cir- 
cumlocutions in which such friendship mentions them, the very baldest 
and boldest literalities of speech. Without resorting to the old-fashioned 
pedantry of putting such conversation into a Latin note (as if Juvenal 
and Apuleius had set moderns the example of using their native speech 
for a cesspool of baleful immoralities that could not flow exposed to com- 
mon view down the channels of our sunlit Saxon), I cannot report the 
second President's habitual style of talking. It is sufficient to say that 
all subjects which, by the common consent of civilized communities in 
this age, are wholly withdrawn from the currency of talk, were his most 
favorite and habitual topics of conversation ; indeed, I never saw any man 
who had known him a day without learning his opinions upon some one 
of these subjects, or hearing him refer to them in the most unvarnished 
terms and with a peculiar lickerish relish. He is as audacious on the 
platform as he is in the parlor. I never should have believed possible 
the reports I have read and heard of his speeches, had they not been 
authenticated to me by the consenting testimony of numerous most re- 
spectable and unbiased men present on the occasions when they were 
delivered — still more by my own ear-witness of identical language used 
in private. Heber's favorite audience is one largely consisting of " the 
beloved sisters," and to this he expatiates by the hour after a fashion 
which would crimson the cheeks of an assembly of Camilles not utterly 
lost to the memories of a piu-e home and childhood. No more over- 
whelming proof can be offered for Mormonism's degradation of the mar- 
riage tie and its extinction of man's chivalric feelings of respect and pro- 
tection toward woman, than the fact that men of refined, gentlemanly, 
and scholarly antecedents, like Dr. Bernhisel, for instance, can hear one 
of their own sex talk in public to their sisters, mothers, daughters, and 
wives, upon the most private subjects in the most blatant way, and not 
tear him in pieces where he stands. 

On this particular occasion, Heber disappointed the morbid curiosity 
of such Gentiles as had gone to the Bowery to hear something improper, 
unless, indeed, their tastes were so simple that disloyalty satisfied them. 
Heber took no text, but his address was directed at the California regi- 
ments under Colonel (now (jeneral) Connor, lying camped on the first 
rise toward the Wahsatch Canons, about three miles out of the city, and 
admirably well posted to command it, either as an army of observation, or 



510 ^ APPENDIX. 

in a strategic point of view. Heber did not like to have them there ; 
their presence was an insult to the Mormon Government ; they were 
there ostensibly lor the purpose of protecting immigration and the mails 
against the Utes, the rebel split from Washki's Shoshones, the Pi- 
utes, the Go-shoots, and other hostile Indians of the Range and Desert ; 
but the no less important function they were there to discharge, and the 
Mormons knew it, was the protection of United States officials, and the 
preservation of at least a semblance of United States authority, in oppo- 
sition to the Mormons themselves. From the roof of the O^jera House 
their white line of tents could be seen plainly beyond the rich green 
foliage that embowered the city, extending like a flock of snowy storks lit 
in a broad high meadow to rest on their way across the Continent ; and 
in this view were a charmingly picturesque set of objects. But unlike 
the poetical and migratory birds which they resembled, they were not 
harmless in their manners nor temporary in their sojourn. They were 
there to enforce taxes and drafts, if such were resisted ; to see that the 
Territorial Governor received respect, and Gentiles got even-handed jus- 
tice in lawsuits with saints, through the medium of inviolable United 
States courts ; they were there in fulfillment of Uncle Sam's constitu- 
tional pledge to sustain all his nephews in the enjoyment of a republican 
form of government. Their preparation for the maintenance of all these 
rights and causes was of the meagi-est — a couple of howitzers perhaps, 
and half a dozen little field-pieces, the heaviest carrying only a twelve- 
pound ball. But the men behind the guns were the true batteries. 
Though they might eventually be overwhelmed by numbers, — in fact, 
must be, if smouldering hostility ever broke forth into belligerent flame, — 
they would burn down the city first, and serve their cannon till the last 
round was exhausted ; then, making their extirpation the costliest job the 
Mormons ever undertook, die in their first tracks on a mound of their 
fallen enemies. They were old Californian grizzly hunters, men that had 
crossed the heaven-piercing barriers, and slid down the soul-dismaying 
precipices of the Sierra Nevada on snow-shoes ; old Indian-fighters, pros- 
pecters, forty-niners, and vigilance committee men — men who knew 
Fear by name, but had never shaken hands with him. Thrice or more 
had Brother Brigham prayed that these buffeting messengers might depart 
from him ; but Uncle Sam had answered him as a higher power an- 
swered the other apostle, thus far, however, omitting to give him grace 
suflicient to bear them. They wanted to be there, curious to say, as 
little as Brother Brigham wanted to have them. They had enlisted at 
the very outbreak of the Rebellion, with the understanding that they were 
to go east and south to fight the battles of the Union ; with most of them, 
I believe, it was an express stipulation. Judge of their chagrin when 
they found themselves compelled to settle down in their present life of 
inglorious ease under the Wahsatch — their only smell of powder coming 
in skirmishes with Indians ; the employment of their seething energies 



APPENDIX. 511 

limited to this cat-watching-a-6iouse-liole kind of business ; the whole 
gigantic sell resulting from the government's changing its mind as to the 
economy of giving them transportation to the Potomac, without allowing 
them to change their minds as to the validity of their enrollment. But 
though they grumbled (in fact, I don't know but it would be more accu- 
rate to say, all the more because they did grumble), they were as stanch 
and formidable defenders as the Union could have had in Utah. 

Heber told his audience that they must cultivate feeUngs of Christian 
forgiveness to the blue-coat sojer-men ; they were all poor critters that 
had to do what they were bid, and probably none of them would keer, of 
their own accord, to be sticking their noses into the business of other peo- 
ple, and be spyin' and smellin' around a community of honest, industrious, 
respectable people that hadn't never done 'em no harm inowyshaper- 
manner. I don't know that Heber regarded this adverbial phrase as a 
single word, but he always pronounced it so. Poor critters ! he contin- 
ued, — with a sigh of such peculiar pathos that one felt he would like to 
eat them to put them out of their misery, — how could they know that the 
time was comin' when they would call on the Wahsatch to cover them, 
and the devouring flames of the Lord should roast them till the flesh 
sizzled on their bones, and they should cry out for Death to come ; but 
Death wouldn't have nothin' to do with their lousy carcases, any more'n 
you or I, brethren 'n sisters, would touch a lump o' cowyard manure when 
we'd just washed our hands to go to meetin'. Little good then would 
their shoddy coats do 'em ; the devil, who had a mortgage on them and 
the contractors that made 'em, wasn't scared at blue jackets and United 
States buttons. He did sincerely hope to see the day, brethren 'n sisters, 
when they might all be licked clean up as the small dust of the balance, 
'n not one stone left upon another ; but till then it was their duty to in- 
dulge a sperrit of Christian forgiveness. O yes ! them and their wives 
and their little ones, though they whirled 'em around on their bayonets 
and stamped the blood of their prophets in the dust, until the terrible day 
of the Lord should come, and the Saints could sit under their own vine 
and fig-tree with none to molest 'em or make 'em afraid. He was a 
friend to 'em himself — he was. He didn't want to see 'em ripped open 
and torn to pieces with just wrath like a gutted catfish. He pitied them, 
for he thought of the day when the oppressed would hev to rise agin 'em 
and drive the last footprint of the tyrant from the soil God had given to His 
people. He pitied the people of the States, all on 'em. They were fightin' 
their brethren for the sake of the niggers. Talk of niggers ! Where 
were there miserabler niggers than the poor slaves that followed the fan- 
atic Abolitionist leaders at the North ? They didn't dare to say their soul 
was their own ; they had to go and fight their brethren and get licked — 
they always were licked like hell, and he thanked God for it ; everybody 
ought to that went into other people's premises and tried to break up 
their family arrangements ; and slavery was a family arrangement just as 



512 APPENDIX. 

much as ours, brethren and sisters. Tliey had to follow their leaders like 
sheep over a stone wall, and get butchered like sheep by the thousands 
and thousands ; but, thank God, the thing was pretty nigh played out, 
and before long we'd see it. The Union was all gone to hell; there 
wouldn't be enough left in a few days to bury its carcase decently. There 
never could be any such thing as a reunion ; henceforth and forever the 
North and South were two separate nations, and the South were much 
the better fellows of the two. If he had been East at the breaking out of 
the rebellion, — as the Abolitionists called the Southerners' trying to keep 
them from stealing their niggers, ravishing their wives, and murdering 
their old men and babies, — he would have shouldered his musket and 
marched down to help those brave fellows, the Southerners — you bet ! 
But they didn't need any help ; they had no more to do than they could 
attend to. What was faith ? It was knowledge that the Lord God Om- 
nipotent reigneth. It was a belief that things would come to pass. Now, 
did we, brethren and sisters, believe that things would come to pass ? 
That the proud enemy would be destroyed, yea, smitten, until they that 
were in the uttermost isles should be proud of his tokens, and Lebanon 
should not be sufficient for a burnt-offering thereof ? Had we that ? He 
hoped we had, though there were some that hung down their feeble knees. 
This was a great day — there was no doubt but the Lord was moving. 
He pulled up a new peg and sot down a new peg every day. If we had 
not faith that brother Brigham, if necessary, could be inspired by the 
Lord to tumble Ensign Peak into Salt Lake — and we might live to see 
greater wonders than that, only we hai-dened our hearts as in the day of 
provocation — we had no show for heaven at all. It was a grain of mus- 
tard-seed, but it filled the whole earth. Wasn't that a miracle ? But 
His arm is not shortened. He was sorry to see that faith was waxing 
cold. Some of the young sisters needed a sort of stirring up — the breth- 
ren too were drowsy — he wasn't talking about the hot weather, though 
it was so hot he guessed he'd take a drink (took a drink and wiped his 
mouth on his cuff) — it would be hotter yet, and no drinks neither, if 
they didn't yearn inwardly and seek the kingdom. Where was he ? O 
yes — stirring up — till they should cry hosannah — with a sharp gad — 
a ten-foot pole, as he might say of gospel truth and exhortation — until 
they should repent and do their first works. Why, when they first come 
out here, weren't there lots of 'em that were glad enough of a peck o' j'el- 
low meal to keep themselves, and their wives, and their little ones from 
starving, and now they were riding around in their spring wagons, and 
old Buck and Bright that drew the Ark of their Covenant, their family 
ark, not built out of shittim wood, but ash and hemlock, across from the 
States — they were changed off for two-forty nags, and everything was 
to cut a dash ; but what they had gained in this respect (here he adopted 
the fixmous gesture made by Everett in his " Washington " address, and 
slapped his breeches pocket till the chink rang), was more'n lost by the 



APPENDIX. 613 

fallin' off in sperritooality. But he guessed that what he'd said would 
bear fruit, and if it didn't he wa'n't to blame — he had done his dooty, 
and now he guessed he'd wind up. He hadn't made a speech to edifica- 
tion ekil to brother Brigham's, but he was a horse of another color, and 
there was plenty in what he'd said, any way, to bring 'em into the king- 
dom ; leastways, if he couldn't carry 'em slap in, up and through, to give 
'em a saving hist any how, and might the Lord bless 'em all, forever and 
ever, amen ! 

After Brother Heber's sermon was concluded, we had another hymn sung 
with great earnestness, for it was set to the tune of the " Star Spangled 
Banner," and there was enough of the American element present to tinge 
the whole audience with enthusiasm despite the chuckling disloyalty of 
Heber. It is hard for Uncle Sam's prodigals to forget the old man ; Joe 
Smith does not seem to take his place at all ; and all the American Mor- 
mons outside the governing class, feel a sneaking thrill for the liberty 
pole and the spread eagle. One Sunday night a party of Conner's blue- 
coats got leave to come into service at the Bowery. The Mormon choir 
happened to select for one of their hymns that evening, this same tune, 
dear to patriotic hearts, and voices of 2j octaves compass. The boys who 
occupied a seat in the back part of the " Meetin' " had listened attentively 
to all the preceding service — had borne good-humoredly the invariable 
diatribes against the Government which formed the staple of Mormon 
sermons ; and had conducted themselves with the utmost decency, in 
accordance with Connor's orders, to avoid all cause of quarrel with the 
Saints, until the Mormons began to sing the national air. At first they 
found outlet for their enthusiasm in joining the music, but soon found 
they did not fadge with the regular attendants on the sanctuary. Not 
being favorite visitors, they had received from nobody the courtesy of a 
hymn-book ; and not being acquainted with the hymn, they sang Key's 
original words as they had learned them in camp. Having good out-door 
voices of their own, valuable rather for strength than skill in ritenuto 
and piano passages, they soon smothered the sacred under the profane 
lyric, and became aware by ominous scowls from the surrounding benches 
that they were disturbing the worship of the sanctuary. Always desir- 
ous to keep the general peace, they forthwith held their own, contenting 
themselves with such relief to ovei'charged nervous systems as might be 
afforded by beating time with their feet and fingers. Just as the choir 
finished the last verse, their ecstasy becoming incontroUable, burst forth in 
a volley of applause mingled with hurrahs. This was the feather which 
produced dorsal fracture in the IVIormon camel. " Young men ! " said a 
venerable bishop, sternly, from the rostrum, " you forget that you are in 
the house of the Lord." " Not a bit of it, ole hoss," one of the boys 
" spoke right out in meetin' ." " What in thunder diye want to sing such 
all-fired nice tunes for, if you want a feller to sit still and bust himself? " 
On the present occasion there were none of the blue-coats present and 
33 



514 APPENDIX. 

nobody "bust himself," but after the hymn an elderly gentleman (of 
sixty, perhaps, or thereabouts) rose and approached the (more or less) 
sacred desk. He was of good height and had had no quarrel with his 
cook. His weight might have been two hundred ; his general complex- 
ion was a cool permanent pink which shaded artistically into the warmer 
Magentesque tinge of a large, generously nourished, and globularly termi- 
nated nose. His clothes were that gray homespun which told of a Pene- 
lope among his wives ; and it was right he should have one, for in some 
respects he was the " tro\vfj.-nTis OSuo-o-ti/s," the many counseled Ulysses of 
Mormonism. He was the historian and keeper of the sacred archives, 
the cousin of the martyr Prophet and Revelator Joseph — George Smith. 
He wore a pair of silver mounted spectacles ; and his hair, which was 
rapidly turning white, hung in long, flossy strands from about a forehead 
whose slippery shine and intellectual height and bumpiness reminded 
me of Patriarch Casby in " Little Dorrit," while it suggested for its reful- 
gence a supernatural explanation. Among prophets and seers we cannot 
expect to see heads crowned with festal ^vreaths, — " Caput nitidum 
non licet impedire myrto " (although the nose did look secular and 
temporal) ; but this good man's polished poll might perchance be ac- 
counted for by the glaze naturally consequent upon the habitual resting 
on it of saintly halos and tongues of fire 

Mr. Smith spoke very well. I don't know how much inspiration is 
claimed for the Apostles who speak on Sunday, but if he was not in- 
spired he did not seem to miss it, for much that goes by the name is in- 
ferior to his sermon in good sense and interest. He reviewed the Mor- 
mon past in a vigorous sketchy way, contrasting it with the present, to 
show how manifestly the Saints had been the peculiar care of Providence, 
and how much cause they had for encouragement regarding the future. 
His references to the early persecution of the sect were remarkably tem- 
perate. I was surprised to find in the representative of a family which had 
suffered more than any other among the Mormons from the rancor of the 
Gentiles, altogether the calmest spirit manifested by any Saint I heard 
broach the subject. His mood was humorous and hopeful, and when he 
concluded his speech his audience were all smiles and cheerfulness. One 
of the bishops then made a prayer ; and after singing another hymn the 
congregation dispersed. 

George Smith's reference to the persecution of the Saints revived in my 
mind the memory of facts without taking which into account it is impos- 
sible to do justice to the Mormon people. We see their polygamy, their 
disloyalty, their cruelty to immigrants passing through Utah on the way 
to California, and they become mere devils to us, without one bright spot 
in the character, one atom of palliation for their spirit and their deeds. 
They are a people apart from the rest of mankind — not governed by the 
ordinary laws of human nature — vindictive, treacherous, blood-thirsty, 
wholly bad. Even among the wildest, most reckless of the neighboring 



APPENDIX. 515 

frontiersmen, among persons claiming neither morals nor religion of their 
own, the Mormons are spoken of as a distinct race of beings, possessing 
the craftiness of the fox, the ferocity of the bloodhoimd, the salacity of 
the baboon, and the absence of all iDrinciple which characterizes the 
brute creation. One of the worst men that I met between the Missouri 
River and the Pacific spoke to me of them with a shudder, as an area 
thief would speak of a murderer. People living east of the Wahsatch 
talked of them with bated breath, if indeed they mentioned them at all 
— then only after searching scrutiny of me, and glancing in every direc- 
tion to see if one of their lurking spies might not chance to be within 
earshot. The Gentile settlers in the mountains seemed to have more 
fear of them than of the Indians at their worst. 

I am inclined to think that this reputation is not so much an annoyance 
as a satisfaction to the Mormons. It is not the mere result of atrocities 
■which they have committed, though some of these, like the Mountain 
Meadow massacre, are well calculated to strike terror into every Gentile 
heart ; but part of the Mormon strategic system, invented and carried out 
in all its manifold complications by that longest-headed of men, Brigham 
Young. He knows that in some cases not only a good, but a bad name, 
is better than riches. The current knowledge that a man can snuff a 
candle with his Derringer, or has repeatedly killed his man on the " field 
of honor," saves him many an insult and many an encounter. Under the 
protection of a reputation for massacres, Brigham is aware that his people 
may sheathe the bowie-knife, and attend to the development of their 
country's more peaceful resources. He chuckles to think how his buga- 
boo keeps the children out of the sweetmeats'-closet, and his Guy frightens 
the cows from his corn. Utah needs all the labor she can possibly get in 
her thirsty fields and her wooded caiions ; in her infant shops and manu- 
factories ; on her mines of useful and, in some privately known localities, 
of precious metal; on her road making, her city building, and the founda- 
tions of her Temple. Every man spared from defense is gained by 
industry ; and Brigham alone knows how much is saved the Church 
exchequer in fortresses, military equipments, and militia drills, by the hard 
earned reputation of his people for ferocity. His capital lies right on the 
transit line between the two sea-borders of the Continent. Not only 
peaceful agriculturists but blacklegs and scamps of every kind pass 
through Salt Lake City, on their way between the Atlantic and Pacific 
States. All trains camp in or about the city, yet he never needs to 
reinforce his police ; there is never any row or disturbance among them, 
because an undefinable sense of prompt and certain death hangs over 
every man who meditates an outrage either against the Mormons or 
his fellows. The emigrant feels that his steps are dogged by Mormon 
spies every rod of the way from the Missouri River ; that the ranchman 
on the Plains, anywhere within a thousand miles of Salt Lake, the driver 
of the stage, the hunter, the guide, even the other emigrant like himself 



516 APPENDIX. 

whom lie encounters on the way, may be noting all he does and says, to 
forerun him to the New Jerusalem, and be entered on the Prophet's memo- 
randum-book against his arrival. So his circumspection increases until it 
amounts to fear, and an absolute awe settles over him as he enters the 
red defiles of the Wahsatch Canons. 

The abundant portion of the Mormon reputation for ferocity which is 
true must be read in the lii^^ht of the past, or injustice will be done a 
hundred thousand souls who, in spite of their polygamy and disloyalty, are 
still our fellow-citizens. If the Mormons are vindictive, let us remember 
what a training they have had. In 1830 the " Church of Jesus Christ of 
the Latter-Day Saints " was first organized by Joseph Smith, though for 
ten years previous he had professedly lived in the receipt of communica- 
tions from angels. Divine inspiration, and all the other signs of Apostle- 
ship. Two years after, on the 25th of March, 1832, at Kirtland, Ohio, a 
mob tarred and feathered him and his disciple, Sidney Rigdon, for 
promulgating their sentiments by word and practice. (This was long 
before polygamy had been thought of as a tenet in the Mormon creed 
— the Saint's possession of their goods in common being their most 
obnoxious principle). The next year, on the 20th of July, another mob 
tore down the printing-office of the earliest Mormon newspaper, at 
Jackson City, Missouri ; tarred, feathered, and whipped the Saints, and 
compelled the leaders to leave the town and county ; upon which they 
returned to Kirtland, there to establish another paper, and lay the 
corner-stone of " The Lord's House." A little more than three months 
after (October 31 of the same year), ten houses inhabited by converts 
to the faith were destroyed by another mob. The persecution continued 
to rage, with bloody fighting, till the 4th of November, when all the Saints 
fled to Clay County, Missouri. In December, the Mormons of Van Buren 
County, Missouri, were attacked by their Gentile neighbors. In May, 
1836, the Clay County Mormons were driven out, and went to Carroll, 
Daviess, and Caldwell Counties, in the same State — founding in the last 
of the three a town called "Far West." In January, 1838, after the 
failure of their bank, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon were compelled 
by a mob to flee for their lives from Kirtland, abandoning a " House of 
the Lord " which had cost the Mormons $40,000. The July following, 
about a hundred families, or nearly six hundred people, were driven out 
of Kirtland for Mormonisra, and fled to Missouri. In August and Septem- 
ber, havinp- attempted to elect members of their sect to county offices in 
Caldwell and Daviess Counties, Missouri, they were again mobbed ; and 
in one instance their winning the election excited the wrath of the Gentiles 
to such a degree that the latter turned out from his office by violence 
the officer elected, and several Mormons, Brigham Young among the 
number, had to flee for their lives to Quincy, Illinois. On the 1st of 
October, the Saints were driven out of their homes in Carroll County, 
afler a pitched battle. There was another battle at Crooked River 



APPENDIX. 517 

Missouri, on the 25th, in which several Mormons were killed. On the 
30th, at Ham's Mills, Missouri, sixteen adults and two boys were 
slaughtered by a mob, in cold blood, and with no chance or weapons to 
defend themselves. On the 1st of November, the town of Far West was 
plundered by a mob, who captured Joseph Smith, his brother Hiram, and 
forty other Mormons, and after a mock drum-head court-martial sentenced 
them to be shot ; but General Doniphan interposed to prevent the execu- 
tion of the sentence, and the prisoners were sent to Richmond, Missom-i, 
to be tried. Here the civil authorities released them after a protracted 
confinement in jail, but they narrowly escaped butchery at the hands of 
the militia. Many other Mormons in various parts of the State suffered 
imprisonment about the same time, but were generally released without 
even the pretense of a trial. In 1839, the sect moved its head-quarters to 
Commerce, afterward called Nauvoo, in Hancock County, Illinois, where 
the Saints had rest for a season, and the town increased to a population 
of 15,000, or considerably over three fourths of the present size of Salt 
Lake City. In June, 1841, the Missourians attempted to get Joe Smith 
again into their hands, sending into Illinois a requisition fi-om their Gov- 
ernor. On this requisition he was arrested, but being brought up on a 
writ of habeas corpus, at Monmouth, Illinois, upon examination he was 
instantly released. On the 8th of August, 1842, he was arrested on a 
second requisition, but discharged as before — his arrest being adjudged 
groundless. One would have thought this second defeat of his enemies 
sufficient to discourage them, but it seems not, for a third requisition from 
the Missouri Governor was sent for him on the 26th of December, in the 
same year — only to be decided null, as before, on the 5th of the following 
month, January, 1843. It reads like a joke, but it is the truth that on the 
23d of June, Smith was again arrested, to be released on the 2d of July. 
In 1844 the Mormons made the great mistake of retaliating religious per- 
secution in kind. They had now a home of their own, where their influ- 
ence was paramount, and might, by circumspect behavior, have established 
their position beyond the reach of enemies. But as usually and unfor- 
tunately happens when ill-luck lets up the persecuted, they used their 
new-gained power, not to set the ignorant and malignant who had perse- 
cuted them a better example of religion and philosophy, but to indemnify 
themselves for past injuries by inflicting the like on others, as if they had 
all the while been seeking, not liberty of conscience, but liberty to 
persecute; as if the salve for their own wounds was to stab some one 
else ; as if an injury were to be remedied, not by trampling it under the 
feet of the injured, but by passing it on to some one else. The " Excelsior " 
newspaper having libeled Prophet Smith, was visited by the Mormon 
marshal and his constables, who smashed its press and burned its types. 
Messrs. Foster and Law, the proprietors, sued out a warrant against Joe 
Smith, the marshal, and other Mormons, accessory to the destruction of 
the property, who resisted the sheriff when he came to serve it, and 



618 APPENDIX. 

compelled him to summon the State militia to his aid, on the 6th of May, 
1844. On the 17th of June, he succeeded in arresting Smith, who, as 
usual, was released after a few days' imprisonment. Meanwhile the 
Mormons were ready to defend their Prophet the moment he should give 
the word. On the 24th of June, the Governor pledged his word and the 
honor of the State for the personal safety of Joseph and Hiram Smith, 
and their followers if they would compromise for the sake of soothing the 
exacerbated people by laying down their arms and going to Carthage to 
be tried. The Mormons must have been sadly deficient at that time, 
both in angelic and legal advisers, for a heavenly revelation, or an hour's 
talk in the back-office of any country lawyer, would have shown them that 
this pledge in a practical point of view was not worth the breath it was 
uttered with, — a State, like a private corporation, having no honor, and that 
of its executive, however valuable in a personal point of view, possessing 
no official weight whatever. Deserted alike of angels and attorneys, the 
over-credulous Saints permitted themselves to be disarmed and sent to 
Carthage, under the escort of a company of militia bitterly opposed to 
them, and the next day the prisoners were ai-rested by the authorities of 
Hancock County, Illinois, on a charge of treason. Two days after, on the 
afternoon of June 27th, they discovered how little the most sincerely given 
private pledge could avail for their protection when a mob of Missouri- 
ans, whose number have been variously stated, but were certainly 
over a hundred, came to Carthage jail, beat down its iron doors, and 
butchered both the Smiths, in cold blood, besides inflicting serious injuries 
upon other of the prisoners. On the 4th of October, Brigham Young 
succeeded Joe Smith in the first Presidency of the Latter-Day Church, 
and early in the next year, 1845, "by special revelation," decided that 
the Mormons must leave Nauvoo. This decision was as long-headed as 
BHgham's usually are, for it enabled the Saints to say that they had 
taken the initiative, and had not been expelled by the action of the State 
Legislature, repealing the charter of Nauvoo, which took place nearly ten 
months after, on September 24th, 1845. Though they had anticipated 
this, it was not until it had taken place that they decided where to go. Im- 
mediate settlement of this question became necessary. Brigham Young 
and the Pratts — the latter perhaps the best educated and most scientific 
men in the sect, as the former was the man most thoughtful and capable 
in an executive point of view — had read with great interest Captain J. C. 
Fremont's reports of his Rocky Mountain explorations, which at that time 
were received by every investigating mind with the delight of some 
fascinating romance, and proposed to the convention appointed to deliber- 
ate upon the fiiture resting-place of their ark, that a pioneer company 
should be sent in Fremont's track to prospect for a suitable situation. 
This counsel prevailed over a multitude of others, and in 1846, all but a 
few hundred of the Saints abandoned Nauvoo for Council Bluffs, Garden 
Grove, and Mount Pisgah, in Iowa ; one band of 2,000 Mormons crossing 



APPENDIX. 519 

the Mississippi on the ice, in the month of February. In the September 
following, after a battle of three days' duration, lasting from the 10th to 
the 13th, the rear-guard of the Saints, which had stayed behind to settle 
up their affairs, were forcibly driven out of Nauvoo, and now the entire 
Mormon body, with the exception of missionaries and secret agents, 
•whom it has always been the Mormon policy to keep scattered among the 
Gentiles, as a sort of picket-line to watch the movements of the enemy. 
On the 24th of July, 184 7, Brigham Young with his pioneer party of 143 
men and 70 wagons entered the Salt Lake Valley, and in obedience to 
the Lord's revelation, to which I have heretofore referred, delivered to 
Brigham by an angel, the night previous, on Ensign Peak, selected what 
was then a wild waste of artemisias and saltworts, tenanted only by sage- 
cocks, badgers, and Go-Shoot Indians, as the future site of God's king- 
dom upon earth. The anniversary of this day is the real Mormon inde- 
pendence day, and kept by them with much more eclat than the 4th. 

It is not my intention to pursue their history further. I have only 
endeavored to show that up to the period of their settlement in the land 
where at present they hold the paramount authority, they had scarcely 
known rest for the soles of their feet. The question of their theology and 
their morals does not enter into the consideration Their tenets were 
doubtless extremely offensive to their neighbors on this side of the Mis- 
souri ; they cannot fail to offend the good taste and the religious sense 
of any people indoctrinated into the principles of Christian civilization. 
But this does not alter the fact that their perpetual molestation by mob 
violence during the entire period of their stay in the States, was persecu- 
tion of the bitterest character. One of the noblest achievements of the 
very civilization and Christianity which their tenets offend is the doc- 
trine of religious tolerance. The light by whose ray mankind have 
learned the falsity of those doctrines which constitute the staple of Mor- 
monism, is the very same light by which mankind have discovered the 
loathsomeness of religious persecution. And whether religious persecu- 
tion be loathsome or not, — whether or not the Mormons in some cases 
infringed by the practice of their belief upon the rights of adjoining com- 
munities, — they were certainly harassed and injured to a degree which 
may abundantly explain any bitterness of feeling which they now cherish 
toward their former neighbors. I have no desire to set myself up either 
as their advocate or judge ; I am only one among the many students of 
their problem ; and it becomes such an one to array all the facts he finds 
accessible that he may understand every phenomenon of their peculiar 
existence. Were I one of the early chemists studying the subject of the 
compound SO3 HO, and should find that one . of its phenomena was 
acidity, I certainly should not be thought particularly prejudiced in favor 
of sulphur because I was stringent in my quantitative analysis of the oxy- 
gen and water which are demanded to explain how the sulphur has been 
changed so as to exhibit an acid reaction. The Mormons, like any other 



520 APPENDIX. 

community among mankind, are a compound : many Gentiles who have 
known them would tell me that I might press the figure still further with- 
out breaking its back and call them a sulphurous compound. They are a 
compound who exhibit in the most decided degree the phenomenon of 
acidity. If we really care to come at the truth about them, or have any 
other object than that of gratifying dislike by denunciation, we must 
consent entirely to dismiss the spirit of the special pleader on either side, 
and adopting that of the philosopher, to weigh dispassionately all the 
circumstances through which they have been brought to their present con- 
dition of hatred and vindictiveness. This appears to me the only way to 
study either an individual man or a body of men, and it is in accordance 
with this way that I have rehearsed the grievances which the Mormons 
endured in the States, — grievances of such sore and continuous char- 
acter as might well turn any body of men into Ishmaelites, without regard 
to the question whether their religion was false or true. When I found a 
man as dispassionate as George Smith appeared in his recital of the suffer- 
ings endured by his sect, and recollected that two of his cousins had been 
murdered in cold blood by the enemies of whom he spoke ; when I recol- 
lected how repeatedly Brigham Young had carried his life in his hand, and 
been driven from home, property, everything a man holds dearest, yet saw 
that under ordinary circumstances he controlled his temper and seldom 
spoke revengefully, I could not avoid acknowledging at least in this re- 
spect the intellectual greatness of the men, whatever I might think of their 
views upon theology and religion. If those are false, the triumph of self- 
control in the men is all the greater, for they achieve it without the 
help of that great adjuvant to calmness and self-control, — the being 
right. The world's archives furnish their students with many a sad story 
of people whom the verdict of humanity now calls right using their first 
hour of freedom to enslave, their first firm foothold to supplant, their first 
refuo-e from murder to slay their fellow-men. The gallery of historic 
paintings in which hang the grandest battle-pieces between Superstition, 
Tyranny, and Corruption on the one side. Truth, Freedom, and Holiness 
on the other, contains dark alcoves where the philosopher must turn aside 
to blush for his race as he sees laid in with a bloody brush pictures of the 
Protestant just escaped from rack and fagot dragging thither Arian and 
Skeptic with freshly unfettered hands ; and the Puritan importing across 
the sea the lash and the halter which he had fled from when wielded by 
Prelacy, to lay them on the backs and tighten them round the necks of 
Quaker and of Indian. Yet these were good men, and had a strength to 
rely on, which does not belong" to errorists like the Mormons. We cannot 
wonder at the spirit of the latter when we disapprove it most. 

The noble spectacle of a people breaking the yoke of tyranny to make 
freedom general is preserved for the generations which are to come after. 
The utmost that history thus far shows us is a people breaking the yoke 
for their own freedom's sake. Much has been said by popular speakers 



APPENDIX. 521 

in praise of the Pilgrim Fatliers, as men who crossed a wintry sea and 
buried themselves in savage forests, to establish the great doctrine of 
liberty of conscience. Much as those brave men are to be reverenced, 
such an assertion respecting them seems incorrect. They left their Eng- 
lish homes and sought the American wilderness not for liberty of con- 
science but for liberty of Calvinism. Grant if we will the superiority of 
their set of doctrines over those of Prelacy ; we are still compelled to 
own that their motive in obtaining freedom was nowise nobler than that 
of the Laud faction in seeking supremacy. The liberty sought by both 
High Churchman and Puritan was liberty to worship God as their own 
consciences dictated — not the libei'ty of all men to do the same. To 
acknowledge this is no derogation from the purity of nature, the inflexible 
uprightness, the truthfulness of soul, which their bitterest enemies equally 
with their warmest friends must accord to the early settlers of New Eng- 
land. Indeed, it is only doing them justice to define their claims to ad- 
miration accurately. We prevent the acknowledgment of their real 
excellences by taking in their defense an untenable stand on virtues 
which they had not, — virtues which at that day were possessed by no 
people on the globe. In the early part of the seventeenth century liberty 
of conscience as an abstract principle was the Utopian dream of mild 
enthusiasts ; had it been proposed as a rule of general application of 
national and ecclesiastical government, it would have been scouted from 
the benches of Convocation and the seats of General Assembly alike. 
The furthest attainment that had been made by any people was the dis- 
covery that their own beliefs were right, and that no sacrifice of life or 
property was too great for the sake of securing their unmolested indul- 
gence. Tliis was a great advance from the servility and nonchalance 
which considered individual opinion a matter of no consequence com- 
pared with homogeneous institutions and the smooth working of mankind 
under one supreme hand and eye, like a vast senseless machine, — a great 
advance, but it was not liberty of conscience. The age was not ripe for 
the reception of that doctrine, and to deny its possession even by the 
brave men from whose veins much of our country's best blood is derived, 
is merely to confess that they had not reached a pinnacle of intellectual 
progress which was utterly inaccessible to any people at that day, — a 
height which we ourselves nearly two hundred and fifty years after them 
have only just reached, and on which even we stand but totteringly. 
They are as little to blame for not having attained the doctrine of liberty 
of conscience as distinct from liberty of their particular conscience, as 
they are for not making a screw-steamer of their May-Flower, establishing 
telegraph lines between their Massachusetts settlements, or printing the 
sermons of Cotton Mather on a ten-cylinder press. There was, therefore, 
no inconsistency in their persecuting those who differed from them at 
Plymouth, as they had been persecuted by those who differed from them 
in London, though they would have been most indefensibly inconsistent 



522 APPENDIX. 

had they really set up for defenders of liberty of conscience. Never 
once did they blame their enemies on the gi-ound of their violating such 
liberty ; their grievance lay simply in the fact that they themselves, pos- 
sessing the only truth, were oppressed by errorists over whom they should 
have been supreme ; and the moment that they obtained such supremacy, 
without a thought that they were violating a universal right of mankind, 
they turned the tables on error and suppressed it with its own weapons. 

I do not know where to look for an instance of freedom sought for its 
own beloved sake — not merely as a personal privilege, but as the fran- 
chise of humanity. Even we, the acknowledged color-bearers of liberty — 
we, the American people, who have fought the fiercest battles of history, 
borne the bitterest pangs, suffered the hardest deprivations, and won the 
grandest triumphs, thi-ew oiT the yoke of England with one hand, while 
we riveted our own on the neck of Africa with the other. England drove 
out the Stuarts and subjugated Ireland with fire and sword, under pres- 
sure of one and the same popular impulse ; Holland was, at the same 
time, the fruitfulest mother of freemen and the crudest mistress of slaves ; 
the sound of the lash, and the groans of the tortured bondsman went up 
to plead with God against her from all her tropical colonies, before the 
songs of lofty faith, or the cheers of glorious triumph died on the ears 
of baffled Alva ; France rescued herself from the Bourbons and murdered 
Toussaint L'Ouverture. The philosopher looks in vain through time, and 
round the world, to find a people dedicated to any liberty except its own ; 
and gives \ip the hope of beholding such in his day, with a resignation 
born only of the perception that America, through a succession of fiery 
furnaces, is surely getting purified to take that place of sublime distinction 
in the eyes of his great grandchildren. 

Least of all the persecuted faiths does Mormonism contemplate liberty 
of conscience as a principle of national organization. ISTothing but the 
presence of the United States authority in its symbols of court, camp, and 
executive, prevent Utah from becoming the prey of the most unmingled 
tyranny which the world ever saw. Even the wisest and most dispassion- 
ate of the Mormon leaders look upon popular freedom, both civil and re- 
ligious, as a very undesirable thing. None of them remember their re- 
peated expulsions fi-om home, the ruin of their fortunes, the murder of 
their sons, the atrocities of all kinds which they suff"ered from mobs, as 
outrageous because they violated a principle, but solely because directed 
against them, the chosen people of God. Had the mob been a Mormon 
one, its object the propagandism instead of the extirpation of Joe Smith's 
doctrine, and its victims the Gentiles instead of the Saints, its whole moral 
character in their eyes would have been diametrically different. They 
put down dissent with the same strong hand which smote them in a coun- 
try where they held the minority. Nor is this course on their part the 
result of unreasoning indignation — a mob-method of settling differences 
like that from which they suflered in Missouri. It is the Mormon theory 
of government — the organic principle of Mormonism. 



APPENDIX. 523 

Herein lies the political crime of the system — here is the ground of 
inevitable collision between Mormonism and the Government — the ine- 
radicable root of bitterness springing up between the now isolated nation- 
ality under Brigham Young and the people of the United States, who 
surround and have the supremacy over it. Mormonism is a distinct, sys- 
tematic, dispassionate contradiction of the American idea. Its position is 
one of avowed and essential hostility to that of the nation. Its leaders find 
a serious grievance in the delay of Congress to grant Utah the rank and 
privileges of a State. Here they do not show the practical wisdom and 
foresight which have characterized their views and decided their action 
in many other instances. To make Utah a State would be their own in- 
evitable destruction. They desire the State rank as an addition to their 
own emolument, pride, and power. They would fain possess a State 
constitution, as the Philistines wanted Samson, for their sport. They 
would reduce it to the instrument of their pleasure ; shearing it of the 
strength which endangers tyrants ; blinding it of the vigilance which pro- 
tects the people ; making it play at their feasts, the guardian of freedom 
reduced to a minister of their pomp, little dreaming that the blinded 
giant must surely rise in his wrath, and, bowing on the pillars, bring their 
Dagon temple' to the ground. Woe to Mormonism the day that Utah 
becomes a State ! In the Constitution of our country, in the first clause 
of the fcarth section of Article Fourth it is thus written : — 

" The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a re- 
publican form of onvernment." 

These words are the death-warrant of Mormonism. So long as Utah 
remains a Territory, the way in which its internal affairs are managed, 
under the shelter of a technicality may be left comparatively undisturbed 
by Congress, provided only that the national courts are respected, and 
the national taxes paid. The supreme people of the United States may 
blink at the fact that its territorial citizens are living under the yoke of 
despotism, — especially while the majority of those citizens accept that 
yoke, — for the Constitution only pledges its guarantee of a republican 
form of government to States. But once make Utah a State, and the last 
technical quibble is swept from under the feet of Mormonism. That in- 
stant, and it becomes the solemn duty of the nation — a duty which it can- 
not shirk if it would ; a duty whose neglect would violate the organic in- 
strument and principle of its existence ; a duty from which it cannot on 
any plea absolve itself without confessing its imbecility and branding 
itself with contempt before the world — to extirpate Mormonism as a civil 
institution from the soil of Deseret forever. 

Mormonism is, as I have said, a retrogression toward the ante-Christian 
ages ; a cession of all the ground which has been won from Ignorance and 
Despotism since the bh-th of Christ ; a surrender of every stronghold and 
charter of freedom for which patriots and martyrs have shed their blood ; 
a confession that all reform has only been a worse deforming ; that prog- 



524 APPENDIX. 

ress has been deterioration ; that the sjiread of popular enlightenment 
has only plunged the world into deeper gloom ; that the civil and relig- 
ious emancipations which have cost humanity during our era tenfold more 
agony than has been endured, more tears than have been shed, more 
yearnings and strivings than have been felt for any other cause to which 
its heart can be devoted, are all naught or worse than naught, — as so many 
steps in a course steadily and continuously wrong since the day that man 
emerged from the dark portals of Idolatry and Judaism. 

On the other hand Republicanism stands forth as the representative 
and concrete form of human progress. It is the embodied idea of growth ; 
the solid, aggressive assertion of the fact that man has become wiser, bet- 
ter, happier with every step of the Christian era ; that the triumph of 
popular principles is the triumph of God ; that the utmost independence 
of individual thought and action consistent with the enjoyment of equal 
independence by his neighbor is every man's right, and the most favor- 
able condition for his perfection in goodness ; in fine, that the world has 
bettered and is bettering every year by an equitable distribution of its ad- 
vantages throughout society, and that man's conscience is inviolable : 
these are the things which America stands in the lists of nations to 
affirm ; these, if need be, to defend witli the right arm of power. 

Nothing can bring the Mormon and the national ideas together. There 
is no more compromise between them than between ice and fire, dark- 
ness and light. They are diametrically opposed forces. They are as un- 
mixable as water and oil. Absence of contact between them can alone 
prevent their collision. Theirs is an irrepressible conflict, — as irrepress- 
ible as that between the national idea and slavery, — and this conflict 
must terminate as that one did, with the triumph of the national idea. 
The Mormons feel the parallel instinctively and reveal the feeling uncon- 
sciouslj', in asserting, as they often do, and as Brigham Young did to me 
on the evening of the ball, that the very same spirit Avhich drove them 
from the East brought on the late war of the rebellion. They realize the 
fact that "two cannot walk together except they be agreed," and their 
system is so inherently and utterly obnoxious to that which founds and 
maintains our free institutions, that agreement is as impossible as it would 
be between America and an independent state of cannibals, infiinticides, 
or widow-burners, which by some magic had been transplanted from the 
Marquesas, China, or Hindostan into the place now occupied by Georgia. 
The safety from disturbance hitherto enjoyed by Mormonism at Salt Lake 
has been due entirely to its isolation. This cannot continue always. The 
Pacific Railroad will break it up entirely. When Utah becomes readily 
accessible, the Gentile element, led by motives of aggrandizement and the 
sanitary advantages of Utah as a residence, will come pouring in upon 
the Saints as at Nauvoo. Then the National Government will possess a 
constituency in the Salt Lake region which will demand its interposi- 
tion for their defense, and the American and Mormon systems will in- 



APPENDIX. 525 

stantly come together in the shock of a conflict which though much more 
promptly settled than that from which we have just emerged cannot fail, 
if the present Mormon leaders are alive, to be as bloody. 

I find extreme uncertainty prevailing at the East in regard to the Mor- 
mon character and destiny ; but on no particular point to a greater de- 
gree, than on this — how the collision which I have called inevitable will 
occur, and how it will be settled. Many good and wise men, to whose 
moral natures polygamy is abhorrent, are still unable to see how it can 
ever become a valid ground for the interference of the National Govern- 
ment. To such, any governmental disturbance of local customs regarding 
marriage, looks as tyrannous as dictation concerning statutes of divorce. 
If Congress is to decide that a man may not marry as often as he pleases, 
why, they ask, may it not also settle the question as to what constitutes 
the legal ground of separation ? In the majority of the States nothing 
but infidelity is admitted as such a ground ; in a few States the decree of 
divorce is issued upon the simple proof of marital unhappiness. In the 
latter States both the divorced parties are free to contract fresh alliances. 
But, supposing that such divorced parties should come into one of the 
former class of States and select new partners, in this State they would be 
guilty of bigamy, their former partners not having been separated from 
them on any ground allowed by the State. Wliy should not such a case 
of bigamy be made the subject of Congressional legislation as well as 
that of Utah ? Moreover, marriage seems essentially to belong to those 
matters which are with most propriety settled in foro conscientice ; or, if 
we regard the importance of that relation in its bearings on the neighbors 
of the married, as settling to a great extent the happiness and safety of 
the social system, legislation upon it may most naturally be committed 
to the community immediately concerned. Those who have favored na- 
tional legislation against polygamy are in the habit of comparing it with 
slavery — an institution with which Congress to a certain extent was 
always obliged to concern itself, and which, finally, it was compelled by 
ratificatory action, at least, to destroy, in spite of the fact that it was do- 
mestic and internal to separate independent States. The analogy, how- 
ever, is a strained one. In the humanitarian point of view, slavery and 
polygamy are entirely diff'erent. The slave is held compulsorily ; in Utah 
the wife of the polygamist is not obliged to stay with him a single day 
after she is dissatisfied. She has merely to go to Brigham Young and 
inform him that she is unhappy with her husband ; upon which, after suf- 
ficient investigation to ascertain that her step is deliberate, and not the 
result of a sudden fit of passion the consequences of which she would repent 
in her calmer moments, the President decrees a divorce immediately. 
Cases have occurred in which a woman entered Brigham's office the wife 
of one man and went out of it another's. Nor does polygamy resemble 
slavery in the expansiveness of its results. The fact that a negro could 
be made to produce a hundred dollars' worth of cotton on one tenth of 



526 APPENDIX. 

the outlay in food and clothes for which a similar amount of labor could 
be procured from the poorest freeman, tended to depreciate labor through- 
out the entire country ; and when, as often happened, especially among 
the class of slaves resulting from slavery's favorite practice of " miscege- 
nation," not only brute labor, but a high grade of mechanical ingenuity 
and artistic skill, could be procured for the still minuter fraction of an 
equally accomplished white man's wages, — not only muscular strength, 
but intellectual ability was undersold and degraded through the length and 
breadth of the land. But the possibility _of marrying two wives in Utah 
affects none of the partners to monogaraic marriages in other parts of the 
country — does not degrade the marital relation, nor alter the sacredness 
of the tie and the condition of the married woman elsewhere. In fact, 
the example of a polygamic community operates, by way of warning, to 
intensify the monogamic spirit of people beyond the boundary of its im- 
mediate influence. To say the least, the marriage question is a very del- 
icate and complicated one, and the central power of a Union like our own 
must hesitate long before it touches the question in any Territory or State. 

But there is no need of such an interference. Every end which might 
be attained by it may be secured without running the risk of establishing 
a bad precedent — of acting unconstitutionally against the liberty of 
conscience and popular sovereignty — by a method much simpler, even 
though less direct, and so far from being open to serious objections on the 
■ground of om- republican principles, certain to be demanded in obedi- 
ence to those principles, for the settlement of the Mormon question, at no 
distant day. The moment that Mormonism becomes a power dangerous 
to the peace and supremacy of the Union, admit Utah into the sisterhood 
of States, and fulfill to her people t|ie constitutional guarantee of a 
republican form of government. For the attainment of that end. Congress 
will be compelled to deprive the Church of all civil authority ; and the 
unhallowed union of Church and State once terminated, Mormonism 
necessarily sinks to the level of any other sect. That sinking means 
destruction. Episcopacy and Presbyterianism flourish still more healthily, 
as we have seen in this country, when disentangled from the corrupting 
embrace of civil power; no longer state churches, as in England and 
Scotland, they become churches of the people, and draw fresh blood from 
the great, warm heart on which they were naturally meant to lie : but 
Mormonism has no popular basis — it must have authority, or perish. It 
is government as much as it is worship — it is a despotism in both ; in fine, 
it is Judaism revived, or rather, galvanized into a mockery of life, and 
adapted to the nineteenth century, in the particulars where it has not 
force enough to adapt the nineteenth century to itself. 

I have repeatedly asserted that Mormonism is Judaism, and this seems 
the best place to examine how far that assertion may be verified. There 
has always been a Judaizing tendency at work, with greater or less vigor, 
in the body of Christian civilization. It troubled the Apostles, who could 



APPENDIX. 527 

scarcely leave their flocks before Judaistic teachers sprung up among 
them, and tried to bring them back under the former yoke of bondage. 
It has manifested itself ever since, in efforts made to substitute cumbrous 
rituals for the simple worship of a loving nature and righteous living ; 
sacred places like Samaria and Jerusalem, like Rome and the Temple, or 
the church edifice in general, for the spirit in which God would have men 
worship Him ; special sacred days, fasts, feasts, " new-moons and Sab- 
baths," for the one unbroken day of a whole devoted life. In the religion 
of this country the Judaizing tendency has powerfully manifested itself. 
Noble in its spirit, purposes, and results as Puritanism to a great extent has 
been, it has greatly favored and fostered this tendency. It has distrusted 
the mild discipline, the persuasive doctrines of the Christian dispensation, 
impliedly treating them as too lax for the regulation of human life, and 
needing to be reinforced by the sterner threats, and more terrible penal- 
ties of the Mosaic ages. It has abjured the doctrine of pi-ogressive 
revelation, and confounded the fulfillment of a dispensation intended for 
the infancy of mankind with insult to that dispensation and its blasphe- 
mous degradation from the respect due a revelation of God ; forgetting that 
the Bible itself declares its temporary purpose, calls it at best but a 
shadow of good things to come, and says that the first generation of our 
present era should not pass away before every jot and tittle of it was 
fulfilled. Standing on the untenable ground, that a system which was 
true for a given time and race, must be true for all times and all races ; 
moreover, influenced by a sombre spirit peculiar to its own moral constitu- 
tion (without which it would not have fallen into its intellectual mistake), 
it has favored the introduction among our people of a sort of hybrid 
religion, which may be called, at the risk of a theological bull, Old Testa- 
ment Christianity. The child brought up under its discipline finds it 
hard to believe that the Messiah has really come, and cannot see anything 
but a technical ground of disagreement between Christians and Jews. 
He hears the Old Testament read at church and in the family quite as 
often as the New — even oflener than any part but the polemic. He is 
taught to regard God chiefly as Force ; he hears of Him manifesting the 
passions of humanity, and a very imperfect humanity at that ; but is 
instructed to palliate these manifestations, on the ground that his force is 
the Supreme Force, his will the Paramount Will. Thus he learns that 
only in finite matters is " might makes right " an abominable doctrine ; 
that making the terms infinite, the proposition becomes a formula for 
the expression of the highest holiness of the universe. The Judaistic 
Christian, as I said of the Mormon, — though in a less degree, because he 
has not been consistent enough to carry out his views to their ultimate 
logical conclusions, — has thrown away the results of the last eighteen 
centuries, and gone back for his spiritual aliment to the crude and half- 
developed notions of truth and laws of life, which were granted to the 
imperfect faculties of the ancients, by that Divine Spirit of accommoda- 



628 APPENDIX. 

tion which prepares for the human race its food in due season, — milk for 
babes, strong meat for men, — and furnishes mankind in any given era 
only with such pabulum as it can digest. As was said above, the whole 
error of Puritan theology lies in its obstinate denial of the lact that all 
Divine dealings with mankind are progressive. It insists on this denial 
because it fears that a confession of the fact involves the unsettlement of 
faith — involves an admission that what is true to-day may not be true 
to-morrow. If it conceded this it must lose its organic existence, for its 
axis is not love but belief — not a principle of life, but a set of doctrines. 
So, there is no way of escape for it. It cannot say that God's revelation 
of himself and of his plan of governing the universe, as given to the Jews, 
was a very good thing — even the very best thing for the day and the 
people to whom it was made ; that it conveyed the largest amount of 
truth capable of being comprehended by an infant race, and that to have 
conveyed more would have really had the effect of conveying less ; that 
just as I say " The sun rises " to a child, whom my utmost effort could not 
cause to comprehend the phenomena of terrestrial revolution, the Creator 
may describe Himself and his dealings to a Jew of Joshua's, David's, or 
Herod's time in a way which was absolutely perfect in its fitness to 
reveal the greatest amount of truth, and inculcate the highest degree of 
holiness which the ancient hearer was developed to attain, but which, at 
the same time, to me with my enlightenment of at least 1870 years plus 
the ancients', should be no truth at all, and no stimulus in the way of 
holiness. 

Unable to make this acknowledgment without the corollary that re- 
vealed doctrine is progressive ; unable to grant that corollary without the 
further conclusion that life, not doctrine, is the only eternal, unchangeable 
basis of religion ; unable to see that Christ came, not to impart an 
immutable creed, which in the nature of human intellect is a thing impos- 
sible, but to infuse a spirit into the life of mankind, which should keep the 
soul advancing into grander perceptions of intellectual truth forever, and to 
implant a deathless germinal principle, whose growth, while it sweetened 
and purified the moral character, should enable the reason to throw off 
shard after shard of creed, as it found their capacities successively too 
narrow to bound and embody the truth which its strengthening vision 
caught, and its increasing constructive powers formulated, — unable to do 
thus, Judaistic Christianity is compelled to accept the obsolete recjbne of 
types and shadows as equally commanding in our present life with the 
Christian regime of perfect day. 

It finds the Divine character delineated in the old Hebrew Scriptures 
by terrible physical symbols, by forcible, but to our present enlightenment, 
degrading anthropomorphisms. In the Scriptures of the Christian dis- 
pensation, — and progressively in the conceptions which have been de- 
veloped under the influence of its implanted spirit in the general con- 
sciousness of our age, — it finds an altogether higher and nobler state- 



APPENDIX. 529 

merit of the relations between mankind and the Divine — of the char- 
acter of the latter, and the destiny of the former. But pledged by its 
original mistake it is compelled to carry both ideals, according them 
equal prominence, granting them equal respect. It therefore sets about 
finding a compromise. In the effort to make them fit, to reconcile them 
where they clash, it finds the Judaistic ideals always the most tyrannous, 
because they are expressed in terms most vehement, and symbols most 
physically tangible. The result is that Judaism gets a great deal more 
than its share in the statement, and the hybrid notions resulting from the 
compromise seem more properly to belong to the Hebrew than the Chris- 
tian period of the world. The disciple of Judaistic Christianity insists 
that his rushlight shall not be blown out though the sun stan-ds at high 
noon, and holds it so close to his eyes that they are too dazzled by its 
fire and bleared by its smoke to see the sun clearly. 

It would startle the old Puritan to charge him with the ancestry of 
Mormonism — but Mormonism is certainly the outgrowth of those Judaistic 
ideas which he has insisted on carrying over, past their fulfillment, into 
the life and thought of the Christian age. Talk with an intelligent 
Mormon upon the subject of his system, and so long as he does not touch 
upon polygamy you will be irresistibly reminded in all that he says of 
many a sermon which you have heard from the representatives of Puritan 
ideas. He loves as well as Cotton Mather, or his intellectual offspring, 
to introduce God to you in an atmosphere quaking with Hebrew thunders. 
He has a perfect arsenal of fiery clouds, and physical hells ; he swathes 
all his metaphors in garments of mysterious horror. He takes the Old 
Testament, as he takes all the Scriptures, literally, and consistently car- 
ries this literal interpretation into his daily life. 

Almost without exception, the Mormon leaders passed their childhood 
under the influence of the sternest Puritan thought. Both Brigham 
Young and Heber Kimball were brought up in its nurture and admoni- 
tion. They look back with reverence upon their parents and teachers, as 
having prepared them for the reception of the full Latter-day glory. I 
am far from charging upon Puritan theology any intentional share in the 
generation of Mormonism ; still, any dispassionate man, pledged to no 
sect, but to the spirit of Christianity in general, cannot fail to perceive 
that Mormonism is the legitimate outgrowth of its intellectual bias 
pushed to the extreme. Judaism has been praised, honored, imitated, 
kept alive in the Christian teaching of the age, until it has at last found 
disciples to reconstruct it as a living institution. 

It is curious to see how the very physical circumstances of Mormonism 
are a copy of the Jewish. The parallel is not a fanciful or accidental one. 
The Mormons acknowledge, in some points intend it, themselves. Kirt- 
land and Nauvoo were their settlements in Egypt ; Joe Smith was their 
Moses ; and when he died too early for a sight of the promised land, 
Brigham Young became the Joshua who led them all the way home. 
34 



530 APPENDIX. 

They have founded their Jerusalem in a Holy Land wonderfully like the 
original. Like Gennesaret Lake Utah is a body of fresh water emptying 
by a river Jordan into a Dead Sea without outlet and intensely saline. 
The Saints find their Edomites and Philistines in the Indians of the des- 
ert, whose good will they can only keep by perpetual tribute under the 
less humiliating guise of presents (as necessary as the backsheesh you 
give to a Bedouin, or the ransom you pay to a brigand), and in the Gen- 
tile troops of Uncle Sam. The climate is a photographic copy of the 
Judaean ; the thirsty fields must be irrigated through long seasons of 
rainless, cloudless heat, while the ridges of Lebanon, here called the 
Wahsatch, are covered with snow. The timberless plains, the wooded 
mountain gorges of Judiea are here, and here are the summer-shrunken 
streams, the dry beds or " wadies," which mark the path of the Syrian 
traveller. In the City of Salt Lake biblical imagery is perpetually re- 
called to the mind by the low adobe houses, which resemble the clay 
dwellings of Jewish times, and by the thick refreshing shade of irrigated 
gardens, where the inmates of the houses rest from the heat of the day, 
and slake their thirst with the delicious juice of that most oi-iental among 
fruits, the melon, which grows as luxuriantly here as in Palestine. I have 
elsewhere referred to the striking illustration of that passage, " He turn- 
eth men's hearts as the rivers of water are turned," when in such a gar- 
den I saw the master leading the precious liquid with his foot to the 
rootlets of some favorite plant by a little extempore channel from the 
main trenches. 

Nature, in Utah, having repeated the physical conditions of Palestine 
as closely as she ever repeats any of her work, has been assisted to the 
utmost by the energies of man. Mormonism is intended to be a theoc- 
racy like the Jewish. ]\Iormonism is a theocracy so far as human agency 
can make one. The Mormons have shown what can be made of the old 
Puritan idea carried out consistently to its ultimate conclusions. If the 
Jewish notions of theology are good for the nineteenth century, they have 
reasoned, why not the Jewish theory of government ? Both being 
equally of Divine ordinance for the Jews ; and one being insisted on as 
binding upon the conscience of the nineteenth century, why not the other ? 
The Puritans, equally with the Mormons, assented to the conclusiveness 
of this logic, and attempted to imitate the Jewish theocracy in their gov- 
ernment of the early New England communities, quoting the Old Testa- 
ment to any extent in support of their civil ordinances for the compulsory 
observance of Sabbath (as all Christians with Judaistic tendencies love to 
call Sunday) ; their commission of penal authority to the hands of clergy- 
men, deacons, and other ecclesiastical officers ; their whole code of relig- 
ious pains and penalties. But the Puritans broke down in one important 
particular where the Mormons have triumphantly gone on. They lacked 
one essential piece of the theocratic machinery — the supernatural. They 
had no prophets ; no miracle-workers ; none endowed with the gifts of 



APPENDIX. 531 

healing and of tongues. They had a very rampant devil to be sure ; and 
witches innumerable, who in partnership did innumerable grievous devil- 
tries and sore witcheries ; but those were all on the debit side of their 
theocracy — a supernatural which belonged to somebody else, and repre- 
sented the stock in trade of a hostile house. Thus they came gradually 
to find that a Jewish theocracy was not adapted to modern times ; that 
is, their children so found it — and little by little, the substitution of here 
a piece and there a piece of governmental enginery resulted in quite an 
enlightened system of Republicanism, such as prevails in the greater part 
of New England at this day. If it were not the sorrowful fact that men's 
religious ideas are a matter of much less essential consequence to them 
than their ideas of material well-being ; and that they will worry along 
with a spiritual system that does not fit, a great while after they would 
have found intolerable a municipal or a digestive system, or even a pair 
of boots of the same character, the inapplicability of the Jewish theoc- 
racy to an era of Christianity and civilization would have been discov- 
ered at the same time with that of the theocracy ; and then we should 
have had no Mormonism. 

The Mormons have been better off than the Puritans. Through supe- 
rior gifts of inspiration and faith, or, as skeptics prefer to say, of " cheek " 
and credulity, they have acquired a supernatural which works as well as 
any in modern ages. They have not an empty shrine like the Puritan 
theocracy ; their divinity has descended to the tripod, and his presence 
fills the Temple. They are not compelled to put up with the meagre 
make-shift of a few petty selectmen and deacons. They have wealth of 
exorcists, and speakers in unknown tongues : the former being as numer- 
ous as the Saints possessed of powerful animal magnetism ; the latter, as 
they are not compelled to translate, susceptible of indefinite multiplica- 
tion. They have prophets and apostles whose imposition of hands is 
infallible ; some of them are said by the ungodly to take away whatever 
they lay their hands on, be it portable property or insupportable pains ; 
they have seers who wait on the Lord and are visited by angels ; but a 
rule prevails similar to that posted on the walls of some public institutions, 
and none of the waiters are permitted to receive anything from visitors, 
except the head-waiter Brigham. In other words, though the doctrine of 
open communication between earth and heaven is recognized by the 
Saints, the only person in the Church who can become the recipient of 
infallible revelations is the President. With his permission, however, 
Heber Kimball 1 or General Wells, his colleagues, may act as his proxy. 

The supernatural element is used with comparative infrequency. The 
fact that they possess it is, generally, enough for the Mormons. Now and 
then, on occasions of great excitement, — like the anti-Gentile assemblies 

1 This assertion was written before Kimball died, but probably holds good for any 
successor he maj' have in the co-presidency. It may be as well, to avoid the necessity 
of any further explanation on the subject, to say here once for all that the entire 
Appendix supposes Kimball still living, and no substantial misapprehension will 
occur to any reader keeping this fact in mind. 



532 APPENDIX. 

during Johnston's occupation, for instance, — a Saint is suddenly inspired 
to speak in an unknown tongue. A friend of mine, present at a sort of 
camp-meeting called together near Nephi in the year 1857, heard one of 
the saints address the audience to great apparent edification for nearly 
ten minutes, in language purporting to be that of an ancient Lamanite 
tribe, called the " Children of Glawdulgrum." My friend took down on 
the back of an old letter (the only note-book which happened to be con- 
venient) a few snatches from the part which, as he said, interested him 
as much as any of it. I give one snatch : — 

" Kravighi ! Karoom '. Ro eptepetla hrancobolomei degesh mapsasal- 
bonor. Hokopariini Keptepenil senkandra. Moipsopagath genendlis 
loluddgro toUa ? Kedepdrkomal uniinu pegesh sokathddlgoni. Nenope- 
temi lalaptdgro ebo-dungruno. Oheki degesh Wi was ! Wi was ! Mo- 
epne Karoom? Mopalpartogos lubebe bdttolob lupete bolobilandro ? 
Manapalbonor Kravighesseros Wi, bagamolu, penetebangroni — solughel- 
depinpin Wi was ! Wi was ! Hrancobolomei degesh epsekenkorugu 
kragash. Molu nongoddgragon ? Otse degesh — Wi was ! Wi was ! " 

The therapeutic imposition of hands and the exorcism of evil spirits 
are supernatural gifts oftener employed ; and their exercise has been at- 
tended with really marvelous results in well-authenticated cases of ner- 
vous and mental disease, such as chorea, epilepsy, neuralgia, hysteria, peri- 
odic mania, and the hke — whose cures, however, the ungodly classify 
with the phenomena of animal magnetism acting upon susceptible organ- 
izations. Of the more startling class of miracles, those seeming to con- 
travene some established law of nature and verifiable by direct experience, 
the Saints are properly chary. Brigham Young's splendid executive 
talents insure revelation from falling into disrepute, since a project which 
he decides to have accomplished, even in circumstances apparently the 
most unfavorable to its realization, is either inherently so feasible or 
carried through by such tact and force of will, that his followers have no 
difficulty in believing that he acts under Divine guidance. 

Possessing the supernatural as the credential and prop of its authority, 
the Mormon theocracy wields more unlimited power than any despotism 
on the globe. Here again it is a copy of the Jewish. As the High-priest, 
after consulting the Urim and Thummim, was infallible, and to be dis- 
obeyed only on pain of death or being cut oflf from one's people, so is 
Brigham in any case, for he carries his Urim and Thummim in his own 
breast — a judgment perpetually flooded with divine light, and always 
accessible. He is therefore the concentrated will, on all subjects which 
he chooses to assume the right of deciding, of more than one hundred 
thousand people. 

He nominally occupies no despotic place. Many a Mormon will indig- 
nantly deny that his power is any more absolute than that of the Presi- 
dent of the United States. The external shows of Republicanism are so 
far preserved that the unthinking part of the population really imagine 
themselves under a free government. Their head is a president, not an 



APPENDIX. 533 

emperor ; but Louis Napoleon might be glad if his supremacy over the 
French were a fraction of that wielded by Brigham Young over the Mor- 
mons. His acts are called neither ukases, nor pronunciamentos, nor de- 
crees ; but no Asiatic tyrant ever issued such irresistible expressions of 
his will as does Brigham in publishing the orders of the Church. He, 
ostensibly, is nothing but the Church's mouth-piece ; yet as the Church has 
no other mouth-piece, and the Church is absolute, Brigham Young is the 
most indisputable tyrant on earth. In Japan — ■hitherto supposed the 
ideal representative of a pure despotism — the supreme power is weak- 
ened by division ; the spiritual and the temporal rulers may fall out and 
the people get their own ; but Brigham Young, under the skillfully painted 
disguise of " the Church," is Tycoon and Mikado in one ; he holds in his 
hand the gathered heart-strings and purse-strings of the whole nation, — 
the wires which control and move the mechanism of their entire interests 
for time and for eternity. 

A page of illustration is worth a chapter of mere statement. Let me 
suppose my reader a subject of the Mormon government, and take him 
through the career which every such an one is liable to run ; showing 
him the nature of the theocracy by the manner in which it may legiti- 
mately act upon the individual. I will expose him to no exceptional 
hardships. I will make him the victim of no peculiar oppressions, such as 
result in every nation — even in our own sometimes, as we must blush- 
ingly acknowledge — to the subordinate who incurs the dislike of the 
powers that be. He shall suffer only from the natural workings of the 
Mormon system — in most respects as all Mormons suffer daily — in all 
respects as some one of them sufiers every month or every year. I shall 
exaggerate nothing; suppose nothing to have happened which has not 
happened in every essential point repeatedly, and been known to happen 
by the great body of the Mormons themselves. 

]Mi'. Polypeith (my reader can well excuse my hiding him under a 
Greek name when I have already gone so far as to take the liberty of 
Mormonizing him) determines that he will leave his pleasant home in the 
Eastern States, and cast in his lot with the Saints of the Salt Lake basin. 
He learns at the New York Agency, by one of whose officers he was con- 
verted, that a train of the brethren is expected to leave Atchison or 
Omaha early during the next month. He converts all his property into 
cash, save a couple of thousands which he spends in getting his own and 
his family's outfit. This consists of a large Plains' wagon with a canvas 
tilt, a load of furniture and provisions, a few cattle, and four mules whose 
value will be about doubled when they reach Salt Lake, or more than 
doubled if after they have drawn his wagon there he sends them on to 
California. The Polypeith family penetrate the Wahsatch by Emigration 
Caiion, and proceed to the public square, situated at the centre of the 
city. Here the Church, in the person of one of the presidents, or an 
elder appointed by Brigham, — perhaps, as happens on some occasions, 
though more rarely than in the early days of emigration, in the person of 



534 APPENDIX. 

Brigham himself, — meets Mr. Polypeitli, makes him an address, and gives 
him the right hand of fellowship. He is then appointed quarters until he 
can look about him and prepare for his family permanent accommodations 
consistent with their circumstances, and the will of the Church. His 
wagon is unpacked, his goods are stored, and if it be warm weather, his 
cattle may be delivered to the charge of the Church herder, who makes a 
note of their marks and that afternoon takes them down to Church Island. 
After he has the dust washed out of his pores and the bruises of his jolt- 
ing ride across the mountains have turned a healthy color, he receives 
a billet from the Church (Brigham), commanding him to report him- 
self at the office in Prophet's Block at 11 o'clock a. m. on the following 
Tuesday. Obeying the mandate, he finds himself at the appointed time 
in a small plain room, like that appropriated by the recorder of deeds in 
a rural eastern county, where he is confronted with the Church in the 
shape of a peculiar but pleasant-looking man in pepper-and-salt clothes, 
who asks him a variety of questions, and with a younger man who puts 
down his answers in a sort of ledger, belonging, when at rest, on a shelf 
flanked by tin boxes. His name, age, and place of nativity are carefully 
noted ; likewise those of his family, and their total number. Then the 
Church (still Brigham) desires to know the avocation he has pursued 
before leaving the States. He replies that he has of late kept a grocery, 
but was formerly a cabinet maker by trade — he thought of going on with 
the grocery business here. Where did he prefer to settle ; in Salt Lake 
City or in one of the outer settlements — Nephi, Ogden, or Rush Valley, 
for instance ? He had meant to settle in Salt Lake City — the chances 
for his kind of business would probably be better there ; besides, there 
were greater advantages there of society and for the education of his 
children. The Church in pepper-and-salt takes an attitude of deep 
thought — hm — hm — will Mr. Clerk reach down from the shelf among 
the deed-boxes Book B ? The Church whispers — there is more thought. 
Mr. Polypeith waits in silent veneration until the Prophet speaks again. 

" Brother Polypeith — The Church, being as nearly as possible depend- 
ent on its own internal resources, is obliged to distribute them with dis- 
cretion so as to use every brother to the very best advantage. The Church 
has no room for any more grocers in Zion itself. That branch of indus- 
try is abundantly stocked at present. Without prejudice to the right of 
changing his avocation at some future time, if he is still so drawn, and 
the Lord opens the way to another grocery. Brother Polypeith may be of 
use to the Church in his former profession, Zion needs another cabinet 
maker. Or (Book B is consulted again). Brother Polypeith may find 
occupation, if he have agricultural leanings, in the development of the 
indigo of Zion. Or, there is a grist-mill sorely needed at Tuilla. But 
really the best opening seems to be that of the furniture." 

The result is that.before he has at all worn off the novelty of his posi- 
tion — standing a full-grown American citizen of means and family, to 
receive absolute dictation upon the method he shall adopt to employ 



APPENDIX. 535 

those means and support that family — Brother Polypeith has changed, or 
gets changed for him, the channel of his entire energies and his future 
destiny in the community where he must live. He entered the Church 
office a grocer, to go out of it a cabinet maker. But the questions are 
not done ; before he goes he must answer further. 

How much property does he bring to Utah ? The entire savings of a 
small tradesman's hard life, he answers — and these amount to the sum 
of twenty thousand dollars. Is Brother Polypeith ready to make oath to 
that effect? He is and does so. Brother Polypeith is then informed 
that the Saints, from Brother Brigham himself down to the humblest 
cattle-boy, own nothing — that the Church owns all, and has a right to do 
what it will with its own. Furthermore, that twenty thousand dollars is 
a larger sum than the Church can availably embark in the cabinet maker's 
trade just now ; part of the sum can be employed for the interests of the 
Church better elsewhere. The Church will accordingly receive from 
Brother Polypeith, to be employed in advancing the spread of the king- 
dom, the sura of five or ten thousand dollars, as the case may be. There 
is no invariable rule for the sum taken ; it depends on the needs of the 
Church, or the wealth of the individual, and on the amount which, con- 
sidering the interests of the Church, can be beneficially employed in the 
owner's especial branch of business. The opinion of the chief party in 
interest (as we should call him according to our unenlightened Repub- 
lican and common law ideas) is of no weight whatever in contributing to 
the conclusion. It often amounts to a quarter, sometimes to a half of 
the entire property brought into Utah. It is now too late to back out (I 
am supposing the Polypeiths already baptized), and very likely there is 
no desire to back out ; the Polypeiths have perhaps known long ago the 
Mormon tenets in regard to the residence in the Church of all titles to 
individual property, or if they have not, their conversion was too thor- 
ough to be shaken by the discovery ; at any rate, here they are, in the 
Mormon power, of their own free will Mormons themselves ; they have 
taken the irrevocable step — and Mr. Polypeith has no alternative. So 
he forks over — we will say ten thousand dollars. That sum forthwith 
goes into the coffers of the Church (to wit, Brigham's Herring safe), and 
neither Mr. Polypeith, his heirs, nor his assigns, ever hear from it in the 
shape of principal or interest thereafter. 

He receives the ten thousand which the Church graciously accords him 
from his own former possessions, and sets up the furniture business. Dur- 
ing the first week or two of his life in Salt Lake City nothing occurs to 
make him sensible of the difference between the Mormon regime and that 
under which he lived in the States. Yet none the less is he becoming 
enmeshed in the secret toils of a system as unlike the free, open-air 
spirited government of our noble republic as the Council of Three, 
Jesuitry, or the Vehm-Gericht. Each of the twenty wards into which 
the city of Salt Lake is divided has a ruler of its own, who takes charge 



536 APPENDIX. 

both of its temporalities and spiritualities with the title of bishop. He 
exercises supervision over the tithes due from citizens under him to the 
Church treasury ; has general charge of the Church's financial interests in 
the ward, and registers mai-riages, deaths, and births. But surpassing in 
importance all his other functions is that of secret investigator. He 
stands responsible to the Prophet President for the private lives — the 
most intimate circumstances and doings of his people. It is a principle 
of Mormonism that the President must be omniscient. The inmost 
secrets of every household must be revealed to him ; he must know what 
is whispered in the bride-chamber, the nursery, in the consultations of 
the lawyer and the doctor, in the lover's courtship, and on the dying bed. 
Fouche never knew as much as he must know, nor does the Superior of 
the Jesuit College. Fouche bothered his head with religious secrets, the 
Superior concerns his with political ones, only as subsidiary to other ends. 
Brigham Young must know all secrets ; and to attain this end indefinitely 
multiplies himself through bishops and their subordinates. The bishop 
is supposed to visit the members of the Church in his ward in the New 
England pastoral sense ; but his visits are sometimes of a much more for- 
midable character than those mild interviews for prayer and religious con- 
versation which the Eastern clergyman indulges in with his flock at peri- 
odic intervals. The bishop's crosier abroad has a hooked and a sharp 
end, each with its several ofhce, — " Curva trahit mites — pungit acuta 
rebelles." The Mormon bishop has no crosier, but he can prick as well 
as pull, and some of his visits are judicial though others be pastoral. He 
has proxies or deputies whose sole business it is to furnish him with that 
stream of knowledge of which he is the President's channel : plausible 
informers who enter families as guests, or watch them through windows 
and key-holes, like burglars making their preparation for a " crack ; " spies 
who climb trees and grape trellises to eavesdrop, or lie all night on ladders 
at second story shutters ; who accept confidences to betray them, and em- 
ploy all the black arts of the detective policeman to possess themselves 
of the very most trifling particular which may sometime be needed as a 
clew to the sinner against ecclesiastical authority. From this espionage 
even the most innocent life is no freer than that of the once detected 
derelict. The Mormon, like the Jew, has to learn that the God of a the- 
ocracy is a jealous God. 

In the States Mr. Polypeith's family has always been such a blameless 
one that the suspicion of suspicion never crosses their minds. They live 
with the same guileless freedom that has characterized their behavior 
everywhere. They little know that not in Milan before the Austrians 
were expelled, not in Havana at the present day — that nowhere among 
hunted Carbonari, Mazzinists, Fenians, Huguenots, Lollards, or proscribed 
French Loyalists, ever existed any people so closely watched in the house 
and by the way-side ; so minutely known in all their goings out and com- 
ings in ; so tracked and noted and booked down to the smallest particular 



APPENDIX. 537 

of their conduct at bed and board ; subject to such scrutiny of the hands 
they clasp, the lips they kiss, the eyes they smile into, and the infinitesi- 
mal shades of expression which they unconsciously throw into clasp, 
kiss, and smile, as they themselves — this self-same blameless Polypeith 
family. So the first fortnight goes on in making acquaintances at home, 
stocking and working the shop on Main Street. Mrs. Polypeith, who 
still remains without a colleague, gets along pretty well at Mormon house- 
keeping by the aid of her two daughters, after discharging her " help " 
because she became too impudent to put up with, as frequently happens 
with her class at Salt Lake, owing to the fact that promotions out of it 
to a wifely rank in the household are sufficiently common to destroy any 
vestige of distinction between mistress and servant, which among the 
more unsophisticated may have survived the transit of the Plains and 
Kocky Mountains. It is not to be supposed that a buxom Mormoness 
will take much pains in doing up another woman's cap when she is occu- 
pied in setting her own for that woman's husband. Mrs. Polypeith has, 
however, given some quiet little teas in spite of her domestic trials, and 
Mr. Polypeith has celebrated his birthday by a modest dinner. 

Early in the week following the dinner he receives an invitation to call 
on the bishop. He cheerfully accepts it — perhaps flatters himself on 
the courtesy with which he is treated by so high a functionary thus early 
in his saintship. He is ushered into a private room, where he finds him- 
self confronted with the bishop and two or three elders beside. To his 
astonishment the object of the interview is not hospitality but judgment. 
He has been accused by somebody (and this is the nearest approach to 
definiteness with which he ever knows his accuser ; it may have been the 
" help " who was dismissed by Mrs. P., after having failed to win Mr. P.'s 
aifections, and thus seeks to avenge the " spretas injuriam formie ; " it 
may have been a guest at the dinner party, who was at the same time an 
agent of the Mormon Vehm-Gericht) of having taken, on the festal occa- 
sion last alluded to, a drop of his own liquor more than was good for him. 
Does he deny the charge ? Does he ask to be set face to face with the 
informers? Mormonism never "goes back" on its spies. The name of 
the accuser is of no consequence. Besides, he is brought up not for trial, 
but for sentence. The bishop takes care of all his flock without any 
assistance from themselves. The trial has been conducted with as much 
regard to his interests as if he were present, and the brother, more espe- 
cially as he is a new-comer and this his first offense, will be dealt with in 
a spirit of the utmost leniency consistent with the salvation of his own 
immortal soul and the welfare of the Church — that absolute theocratic 
proprietor, which owns him " neck, crop, and gizzard," from the tips of 
his boots to the forelock he has pomatumed for his visit to the bishop. 
Or, does he make a plea, as the old common law hath it, " in confession 
and avoidance," acknowledging that on the occasion referred to he may 
have crooked his elbow once too often, but then the superfluous draught 



538 APPENDIX. 

was on his own birthday, in his own house, and from his own bottle ? 
Ruled out ! The Church knows no festivals, no privacy, no proprietor- 
ship but its own. As in " Le Diable Boiteux," so in the romance of 
Mormon Life ; as there with Asmodeus, so here with the Devil (or Angel, 
according as you be Saint or Gentile) of the Latter-Day Church, all the 
roofs of the houses come off like the cover from a soup-tureen ; he 
catches the cover by the knob of the chimney or the cupola, and looks 
down on the family simmering in its wickedness, or refreshes his nostrils 
with its odorous steam of sanctity, and not an ingredient in the pottage 
escapes his omniscience. No man's house is his castle in a theocracy. 
Thus was it with the Jewish ; thus with the Puritan ; and it is thus with 
the Mormon. Acknowledge that God can have deputies who rule in his 
name, and they must be gifted with the prerogatives of God. He does 
not leave the citizen at his door-sill — neither can they. No, Mr. Poly- 
peith ! You have left behind you the pestilent atheism of Republican 
government ; you are enjoying the blessings of that system which so 
many good men at the East have tried in vain to bring back ; you are 
forced to be reUgious whether you will or no. This is no community 
where a man with impunity can go home and get drunk in the bosom of 
his family. So Mr. Polypeith leaves the bishop's with a face longer by 
an inch ; a mind wiser by a revelation ; a pocket lighter by ten dollars — 
exactly the sum which he often used to read of in the pohce reports col- 
umn of his morning paper as paid promptly, " after which the magistrate 
advised the offender to take better care of himself in future, and he left 
the court-room in company with his friends ; " or, in default of which, 
" the prisoner was sent up for ten days." He used to read such accounts 
with a shudder, did Mr. Polypeith ; or, perhaps he thanked God, like the 
Pharisee, that he was not like other men — at least, not like this victim 
of the Publican, enjoying his visit at the generous city's island country- 
seat. Now he, the self-same Eusebius Polypeith, stands mulcted in the 
seLf-sarae sum — a degraded man — mulcted for drunkenness ! He groans 
from the bottom of his being — goes home — and does not tell Mrs. Poly- 
peith. Where does that fine go ? To the Church : namely, to the Her- 
ring safe in Brigham's office. 

A year has elapsed since he came through Emigration Canon. He has 
been tolerably successful in business. One morning he receives another 
missive ; the bishop wants a statement of his profits, concealing, abating 
nothing, under the penalty of Ananias and Sapphira — a statement veri- 
fied by his oath. There is something in the preparation of such a state- 
ment that makes any man brought up with Republican notions wince 
and feel humiliated, — even when he is doing it as a war necessity for the 
sake of supporting a National Government in whose stability he has co- 
equal interest with every neighbor of his. I do not believe that the most 
patriotic man in the United States ever receives the assessor's peremptory 
order to return his income without an instinctive feeling that he is suffer- 



APPENDIX. 639 

ing a sort of grand national indignity — as if the collective sovereign 
people had given him a collective sovereign tweak o' the nose ; or 
searched his pockets like a collective sovereign constable, or looked over 
his shoulder while he was balancing his ledger with a collective sovereign 
impudence which it requires all his philosophy and patriotism to excuse, 
and of which he says to himself, as he sits down to obey the assessor, " I 
do hope that Congress will before long invent some less obnoxious way of 
collecting the national revenue ! " But in making our returns to the 
United States assessor most of us have the relief of considering that we 
voted to support the best government the sun ever shone on ; that we are 
in reality only collecting the tax from ourselves ; that, furthermore, we, 
through the representatives our ballots sent to Washington, shall have our 
say as to the manner in which the money shall be spent. Mr. Polypeith 
has no such relief He is the subject of a theocracy. In 1834, long be- 
fore he had heard of Mormonism, Joseph Smith the Prophet, and Oliver 
Cowdery (one of the three witnesses to whom the Angel of the Lord showed 
the plates of the Book of Mormon), met in Clay County, Missouri, and 
made a covenant with God that they would henceforth pay into his treas- 
ury, for the advancement of the heavenly kingdom upon earth, tithings of 
all that they possessed — imitating the Jewish theocracy in this respect as 
closely as all the others. Thenceforth all the Saints were expected to con- 
tribute likewise, and the custom which binds Mr. Polypeith has no other 
foundation than this thirty-two years' prescription. Nor has he any 
voice, directly, or by vote, in the disposal of his property after it goes 
into the Church coffers, to wit, Brigham's safe. The Church uses its money 
— i. e., Brigham spends it — without taking counsel of the taxed, but by 
Divine command, and that command is revealed to Brigham alone, while 
only the Divine Revelator has the right of looking over his accounts. 
There is, therefore, not one alleviating circumstance in the necessity 
under which Mr. Polypeith sits down to make out his exhibit of income 
for the bishop. Nevertheless, he winces his way through the task, and 
sends back the following : — 

1 Being the 37th year of the Church 
of Jesus Christ of the Latter- 
Day Saints. 
EusEBius Polypeith : Income return for Year ending at Date. 

Resulting from Cabinet Ware business $1,520.00 

Dividends on Stock held in Eailroad Companies . . . 125.00 

" " " " " Insurance " .... 245.00 

Money paid Wife by executors of her Mother's estate in Mass. 300.00 

Total $2,190.00 

Attesiatur, E. Polypeith," 

A few days after this return has been handed to the Bishop, Mr. Poly- 
peith gets his order to repair to the Tithing Office and pay into the 
Church treasury (the Herring safe again) the sum of two hundred and 



540 APPENDIX. 

nineteen dollars. Or, it is possible that he may receive instead one of 
those pleasant episcopal invitations with which he became acquainted 
earlier in the year, and on repairing with a heavy heart to his pastor's 
house find out that the terrible charge of making a false return has been 
lodo-ed ao^ainst him. He feels as guiltless of the wrong as a child a 
month old. He may discover that, in the opinion of the authorities, he has 
overvalued the original cost to himself of some of the articles on which he 
has estimated his profits. In this case he will, perhaps, be startled to 
have copies of his wholesale dealers' charges and vouchers presented to 
him. Or, he may have omitted in making his return to include the 
advance which he has received during the year on the original price of 
a pair of draught horses left behind at the East to be sold, whose pro- 
ceeds were forwarded to him. The transaction has totally escaped his 
mind — not so the Church's ! There, in black and white, he reads all 
its particulars — more precisely drawn out, it may be, than he could have 
done them by referring to his own private papers. A sickening sensation 
comes over Mr. Polypeith's soul as he realizes the omniscience and ubiq- 
uity of that power into whose grasp he has voluntarily resigned himself, 
irretrievably — forever ! If he is really innocent of all intent to cheat, 
Brigham reads character too skillfully not to know it ; and, instead of the 
fearful doom which awaits such as are fool-hardy or green enough to 
attempt defrauding the great Fraud of the Universe, — the outlawry, the 
delivery to the buffets of Satan, the vague, unnamable terrors, the lurking 
death, — he gets off with a solemn warning and a mulct which may 
amount to the duplication of his tithes. 

Suppose that, instead of having succeeded in his annual business by the 
time the next tithing day comes round, he has in reality sold nothing, but 
has accumulated either by manufacture or importation five hundred Bos- 
ton rockers. He has no money to give the Church ; but the Church 
takes toll out of every grist, and all is grist that comes to its mill. The 
Church is not fastidious ; it will take fifty of his five hundred rockers, 
and call it square. What can it do with them, d'you ask ? A Church 
founded upon a rock, one might think, can have no call for rockers, but 
it has. Mr. Polypeith is instructed to deliver them in the great Tithing 
Store-house, right under the personal eye of the Church, sail. Brigham. 
Then, if he has never had occasion to call there before, he sees a sight 
which surprises him. There are carts and rude Utah-made ranch-wag- 
ons standing at the gate to unload tithes of every description of product 
created by human industry. The shelves and the deep ware-rooms of the 
all-devouring theocracy groan and bulge with everything which it is con- 
ceivable that mankind should sell and buy on this side of the Rocky 
Mountains. Here are piles of rawhide, both cow and mustang, or even 
pig-skin ; bins of shelled corn, and cribs full of corn in the ear ; Avheat 
and rye, oats and barley ; casks of salt provisions ; wool, homespun, yarn, 
and home-woven cloth in hanks and bales ; indigo ; cocoons and raw silk ; 



APPENDIX. 541 

butter, cheese, and all manner of farm produce ; even the most destructi- 
ble of vegetable growths, — not only potatoes, turnips, and other root crops, 
but green pease and beans, fruit, and young cabbages ; hay, carpenters' 
■work, boys' caps, slop-shop overalls, hemp-rope, preserves, tinware, sto- 
gies, confectionery, adobe bricks and tiles, moss and gramma mattresses ; 
buckskin leggins, gloves, moccasins, hunting-shirts, and complete suits, the 
manufacture of which the Mormon women make a specialty, arriving at a 
degree of excellence in their preparation, and beauty in their adornment, 
surpassed nowhere in the world, — not even among the Snake Indians. 
These are but a minute fraction of the contents of the Church Tithing 
Stores. I have seen day laborers who were too poor to pay their tithes 
in any lumped form at the end of the year, bringing them in at sundown 
in the shape of a tenth of the poor, flabby-meated gudgeons which they 
had caught in their day's fishing along the Jordan. The Church, under 
the wonderful management of Brigham, somehow or other succeeds in 
disposing of all that it receives in this way to the best advantage, and is 
not only a self-supporting, but a money-making concern of the most bril- 
liant character. By consenting to receive the tithes in form, wherever 
the Mormon finds it easier to bring the literal tenth of his possessions 
instead of their money value, it effects three most desirable ends. It 
secures the certain payment of its tithes, since the products of a man's 
industry are tangible, accessible, unconcealable, and therefore within its 
grasp as no notes or specie can be ; it acts as a perpetual stimulus to 
Mormon industry by affording one certain outlet to every man's products, 
— a market through which he can dispose of at least a part of such prod- 
ucts, however loth private dealers may be to run the risk of buying 
them ; and it adds another resemblance to the old Jewish theocracy, 
which tithed the property of the people in kind, to the multitude of simi- 
larities on which it bases its claim to the successorship of Israel as the 
repository of the Urim and Thummim, the possessor of the Original Priest- 
hood and the Eternal Truth, and the sole Architect of God's temple and 
kingdom upon earth. At the same time, Brigham's talents as a Roths- 
child being none less than as a Moses and a Richelieu, the Church loses 
nothing pecuniarily by taking Brother Clod's cabbages, and Brother 
Polypeith's chairs. 

Mr. Polypeith's diary for the next few years contains nothing more 
startling than the marriage of his two daughters to a well-to-do elder of 
the Church, possessing, besides five hundred head of cattle and a nice 
ranch in the region of Parley's Park, a trifle of two previous wives, who 
live harmoniously, not being able to quarrel, as one of them understands 
nothing but Norwegian, and the other possesses no lingual accomplish- 
ments beyond her original Shoshonee. To IVIr. Polypeith it seems a little 
odd at first to have a man paying attention to both his daughters at once ; 
early associations are difficult to conquer, and an only partially regenerate 
right leg of his twitches uneasily at the memory how it would have kicked 



542 APPENDIX. 

such a suitor down-stairs at the East ; but grace triumphs when he re- 
flects that after all the elder does not mean any such thing as trifling with 
the young affections of the girls, since he proposed to Hannah Rebecca 
on Thursday, and to Lucetta Plumina on the Sunday following ; more- 
over, it is a great deal less wearing and expensive to order a wedding for 
two and get one's family nicely provided for in a single evening, than to 
string the paternal anxiety along. States-fashion, through two separate 
courtships, and disburse for two entirely distinct sets of presents and wed- 
ding-cake. So he says, "Bless you, my children — bless youl " and, to 
use the choice patriarchal vernacular, the elder " gits " with the lot. 

If polygamy at any time, during the progress of these occurences, seem 
to Mr. Polypeith any harder of deglutition because the two wives of his 
saintly son-in-law stand to each other in the sisterly relation, he may lu- 
bricate the morsel by that sage consideration which has doubtless been 
suggested to every dissatisfied person since the foundation of the world, 
" How much worse it might have been." He may have made the ac- 
quaintance of a family such as I myself became aware of while in the 
Mormon Zion. Passing with a very zealous believer through one of the 
streets in that city, I had my attention called by my companion to a com- 
fortable residence, belonging, apparently, to some person of more than 
average condition in the community. "There!" said ..the gentleman 
emphatically, — " there lives one of the very best men we've got in Salt 
Lake City." " How so? " I asked him. " The most noble-hearted, whole- 
souled, liberal fellow I ever knew. Doesn't stand at anything when he 
can do a generous action. Here's an instance. Two years ago his part- 
ner in business died insolvent, leaving two widows and. three daughters 
without a leg to stand on. He was very well off" himself, and a bachelor. 
So what does he do but go right over to his partner's house, see the two 
widows and three daughters — make it all right — and marry the whole 
of 'em. That's what I call a right down liberal action ! " I have seen 
it indignantly denied by Mormon defenders, that marriages of this sort 
are permitted in Utah ; but such a denial on their behalf would be scorn- 
fully repudiated by the Mormons themselves, who rather favor such mar- 
riages than otherwise, on the same ground that benevolent and sage 
old slave-holders, in the halcyon days of the Eastern and Southern Patri- 
archal Institution, used to buy whole families, to wit, that they live much 
more contentedly together than when they are separated. A mother and 
a daughter who are wives of the same man, or two sisters similarly situ- 
ated, are more apt to be patient with each other and freer from jealousy 
than strangers. 

I must now give a page of Mr. Polypeith's diary, which is so painful 
that he himself would gladly have blotted it out with his heart's blood — 
which I, indeed, would gladly suppress, were it not that I am writing the 
truth and have not the romancer's privilege of yielding to sentimental 
motives. Mr. Polypeith's family, after the daughters were married, con- 



APPENDIX. 543 

sisted of himself, his wife, and one son nineteen years old — a fine, 
handsome, frank-natured young fellow who for some time had been a val- 
uable assistant to his father in business, and whom he was rearing to take 
his place when age should release him from the harness of active life. 

Among the neighboring families was one of an elder, whom the Church, 
shortly after Hiram Polypeith's nineteenth birthday, had appointed to go 
forth upon a foreign mission — a tour for the collection of converts in 
Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, which would keep him abroad for two 
years — indeed, until he could bring a shijj-load of fresh Saints from the 
Baltic to New York, and thence across the Mississippi, and the Moun- 
tains to Salt Lake. The elder was a well-to-do man of fifty ; and it 
might have seemed just as advantageous to the interests of Zion to send 
a younger brother, with youthful energy, the " roving drop in his veins," 
the love of adventure, and the desire of making his way in the world, to 
sustain him through the labors of a mission, and less extensive family ties 
to bind him at home ; for besides being a little past middle age, he pos- 
sessed a large property, five wives, and a score of children. Among all 
his wives, as frequently happens, he doted most on the last and youngest 
one, to whom he had been married only about six months when the order 
came for his departure. The mandate grieved him sore, but theocracies 
know no sentiment save that of obedience to revelation, and though he 
would gladly have paid the expenses of a proxy and stayed at home with 
his little Zilpha and the others, he was compelled to bid them all adieu 
and fare forth one morning by the overland stage. 

The elder's family and that of Brother Polypeith had been intimate 
from the first year of the latter's settlement in Zion. They frequently 
met each other in the exchange of hospitalities. Mrs. Polypeith was 
weekly invited to tea at the Salmudys', and the Salmudys, on the princi- 
ple of its being inconvenient to move large masses, were reinvited in 
squads at a rate which went through them all in about one lunar period. 
When the elder came to go away, Mrs. Polypeith mingled her tears as 
she had her tea with the Mistresses Salmudy ; and Mr. Polypeith, grasp- 
ing Elder Salmudy's hand with emotion, told him that during his ab- 
sence he would endeavor to be such a friend to his family, as he would 
ask Elder Salmudy to be to his in case their positions were changed. 

There was one member of the Polypeith family who did not partake to 
the full extent in the general affliction felt at Elder Salmudy's departure. 
This was Hiram Polypeith — the handsome, spirited lad with the curly 
hair, red cheeks, and bright boyish eyes ;— who had his reasons. As 
the Salmudys lived next door to the Polypeiths on the right side, so did 
the Crandalls live next door on the left side. From the day that Mr. 
Polypeith took his house, his garden and the Crandalls' had opened into 
one another by a little wicket in the partition fence, and the relation of 
the two families had been as intimate as that of the former with the 
Salmudys'. The wicket almost always hung ajar, and the children of 



544 APPENDIX. 

both households had held the inclosures in common, playing tag together 
around the gravel walks, dressing dolls and making-believe tea-fight under 
extempore houses rigged up beneath the cool shadows of acacias, quaking 
asps, cottonwoods, and rock-maples transplanted from the canons. The 
youngest child of the Crandalls was a pretty golden-haired girl, with 
laughing blue eyes and merry temperament — the pet of everybody, and 
a gleam of sunshine wherever she Avent. She was the little sweetheart 
of Hiram Polypeith from the time they first played together ; she was 
enough unlike him in every respect, except the fact of beauty and mutual 
attraction, to bring out the strongest positive characteristics of the boy, 
and awaken an intense feeling of chivalry in him, which manifested itself 
in every way — from fighting her battles with ruder and stronger children 
to carrying her tiny dinner when she went to school, and being her in- 
variable guard of honor at all jjicnics to Black Rock or the Lake in the 
Mountains. She returned his feeling with one of absolute confidence and 
admiration — was never so happy as when she nestled against his side, 
and, whenever her light heart thought of the future at all, never imag- 
ined a place in it whose centre was not her boy-gallant. One of 
their most frequent plays (as I suppose is the case with all children of 
every place and age) was " getting married ; " and the romantic tender- 
ness of Hiram's love for little Zilpha Crandall was shown by the fact 
that while the other little male-Saints had polygamic plays, he never 
added to his list of wives, but incurred the temporary suspicion or even 
infantile religious persecution of his mates as a bad' Mormon, by remaining 
sternly monogamic and marrying Zilpha over and over and over again. 

But they could not always remain children and play under the acacias. 
Zilpha, being just Hiram's age, as was woman's right, blossomed first, 
and became a demure, marriageable little Mormoness in long dresses (or, 
as a perverse Gentile friend used to call Mormon little girls, a " Mor- 
moniculess," Mormon little boys being similarly " Mormonicles), " while 
Hiram was blushing at the shortness of a roundabout, which he felt still 
more ashamed to exchange for that uneasily self-conscious garment, a 
coat with tails. Before either of them knew it, the golden-haired beauty 
had attracted the attention of that nmltuxoriverous mammal, Elder Sal- 
mudy, — a splay-footed quadrigenarian, with beetle brows, a raucous 
voice, which one would have as soon thought of as a frog's for the vehicle 
of love-making, and vast expansiveness below the epigastrium without ade- 
quate diameter of legs to sustain such a superstructure. Already, too, as 
the Gypsy Queen denominated Rector Racktithe, married the thii-d time, 
he was " a mighty waster o' women," having foiu" Mistresses Salmudy to 
watch for his martial footfall at the close of the laborious day. To adapt 
Louis in " Richelieu," " Fine proxy for a gay yo'iing cavalier ! " But why 
linger over the hagglings of the marriage market ? Salt Lake is no 
better than New York or London, though it does pretend to be, and 
Mormon parents sell their daughters for a " bon parti " just as ours do, — 



APPENDIX. 545 

ttouorh not as universally as was tlie case in the much desiderated He- 
brew theocracy. The Crandalls were poor — Elder Salmudy was rich — 
Hiram Polypeith was only a boy — Zilpha was an obedient daughter. 
She cried bitterly — vowed she would always love Hiram — and married 
the multuxoriverous monster. As for Hiram — he gnashed his teeth in 
secret — that most helpless, uncommiserated, most laughed at of all 
human beings — a boy indulging a hopeless passion. \Vhat could he 
have expected? He would not be ready to many for years — Zilpha 
was a grown-up woman — did he suppose she was to be bound by the 
plays of a baby-house ? Pshaw ! So he crawled into the straw of his 
father's barn and wept out his heart-break, not even pitied by the hen 
whom his gi'ief had driven off her nest on the beam, and who scolded at 
him with the Grossest of cackles. 

Time will insist on healing such wounds for us though we swear he 
shall not, and despise ourselves as brutes for finally yielding to him. 
What was at first the bitterest ingredient in the boy's cup — the fact that 
his little Zilpha lived next door to him in his successful rival's house — 
became a sort of sad delight — gradually a delight with only a faint 
soupqon of sadness, for he saw a great deal of her without the elder, 
and cherished in his heart that fearful torpedo, liable to explode at any 
moment, the old love for her without the old right. Just as he was 
beginning to go about his work with some sort of equanimity, and to 
answer the criterion which old country women suppose infallible for the 
question whether a hopeless passion exists or not, by " taking his three 
meals reg'lar," Salmudy received the mandate to depart. Hiram could 
have gone to Brigham Young and hugged him round the knees ! It 
almost seemed as if the President had known his heart and intended to 
do him a personal favor. He did not dare to accompany his father to the 
stage office, lest instinct should be too strong for conventionalism, and 
the real sunshine of his heart at Elder Salmudy's parting break through 
the hypocritical clouds upon his face. So he stayed at home, hiding in 
the barn, and through a knot-hole saw with a quickened pulse of delight 
little Zilpha feeding her chickens from the back porch — heard her sing- 
ing blithely while she scattered the crumbs — as light-hearted as if it were 
indifferent to her whether her six-months' lord went to Copenhagen or 
Jericho, and it would be quite the same to her if he never came back from 
either. Already he began to calculate the chances against the elder's 
return : his years were against him ; the journey was full of exposures ; 
there were several sea-voyages to make ; the ocean baffled, there were 
still the Sioux, the Arrapahoes, and the Snakes on the way across Plain 
and Mountain — he blushed, catching himself suddenly, just about to enter 
a chamber of thought which was the vestibule of murder. 

Papa Polypeith's promise to keep a fatherly eye on the bereaved Sal- 
mudys gave Hiram constant occasion to run in next door. He went to 
see if his mother could help them ; if there was butter wanted ; if the 



546 APPENDIX. 

flour was getting low ; if the cattle were getting on nicely ; if his father 
could transact any business for them ; if they wouldn't like to read the 
last New York papers ; if the flower-beds needed weeding ; if he could do 
anything ; if anything was wanted — yes ! something was wanted — 
wanted all the time, by one of that household. And O ! perilous gift ! 

— he brought it — brought all the strong, passionate, flaming love which 
he fancied he had raked out and buried under — the love which by God's 
law was his right and hers to whom he gave it, though man had set on 
it his black seal of execration. 

Neither knew when it came. The curves of danger are so gradual — 
its inclines so smooth. The two thought they were reviving innocent 
childhood's playtime. They sat under the acacias as of old; they 
talked of the houses he made for her to live in, and laughed at their baby- 
housekeeping. Did she remember when he stood in this cedar clump to 
be married to her with a big doll for a bridesmaid ? did he remember 
what he did as soon as the ceremony was over? She blushed as she 
recalled it and dropped her moist eyes ; he folded her to his heart and 
did it again. But they did not feel as they had in childhood — their lips 
parted slower — his arm was harder to unclasp. 

Day after day of delicious dreamy peril went on, in house and garden 

— part of it right before the eyes of the parental Polypeiths ; but they, 
remembering what attached playmates the children had been, and like 
all parents so slow to realize the fact that their child could grow up, saw 
the two walking and talking together, saw them inseparable in their stud- 
ies, their amusements, even their work, so far as they could help each 
other, and never warned them of a danger that they themselves did not 
suspect. Other eyes, however, were not so fondly blind. The other four 
wives of the elder had never been one with that excellent man in his 
admiration for Zilpha. One of them, moreover, was the spiritual wife of 
the bishop of that ward, and on more than one occasion had shown her 
devotion to the Church and to the man who should be her husband in the 
celestial mansions, by acting as eyes for him and the Vehm-Gericht. She 
was bound by the holiest of ties, therefore, to let no iniquity pass her 
scrutiny without revealing it directly to the bishop. Within the first 
month after her earthly husband's departure she had repaired to the hou^e 
of her spiritual one, and told him that she saw mischief hatching. His 
only reply was, " Watch.'" So she did watch. As for the other three, their 
feeling toward the pretty little Zilpha was of a less tragic and religious 
nature ; they hated her and waited to catch her tripping because they 
were unpleasantly homely ; had long and shabby or stocky and dumpy 
figures ; were without grace or womanly development in either spirit or 
physique ; were bald, sallow, wrinkled, uneducated, uncouth, while in 
every particular she had the impudence to be exactly the reverse ; because 
no handsome young man came to console them for the absence of Brother 
Salmudy, therefore they hated her with that poisonous petty hate which 



APPENDIX. 547 

nothing can create in a woman bat the degradation to which she has al- 
ways been subject in a theocracy. Thus, both the Church and Personal 
Jealousy — Artificial Evil and Native Evil — were arrayed against the 
two young lovers, and searched out their most secret communings, their 
most intricate paths, with fiery eyes that never drooped in weariness or 
were damped by pity. Yet the lovers, wrapped in the isolation of that 
heavenly dream which made them the two only human beings in the uni- 
verse, toyed on like mating wrens, just over the fanged jaws of the black- 
snake. 

As innocent of evil intent as Francesca da Rimini and her lover, the 
two thought of nothing but the fact that they loved. They knew that 
they were each other's — they had no room, no politic coolness for the 
thought how to get it acknowledged that they were. They talked as if 
life were to be all an endless now ; as if Time were put to sleep for them, 
Age forbidden to approach them, the world banished from them, the 
elder never coming back from Copenhagen. What they would do when 
he did come back, was a thought which seemed so far away, that to have 
roused them to it from their trance of love would have seemed an imper- 
tinence of the same kind as waking a man from the middle of liis night's 
sleep to decide the choice of a name or a profession for his great-great- 
great grandson. They did not even reflect that Brigham was noted for 
his urbanity and kindness to unequally yoked wives, and that Zilpha's 
unhappy lot might be changed in an hour by going to his office with her 
story as soon as the elder returned and had a chance to be notified of her 
wish for the separation, so that he should not feel as if a trap had been 
sprung on him. Marriage they did not think of, for in the childhood 
with which their present lotus-eating life was continuous, had they not 
been married dozens of times ? How many times we tell lovers to be 
prudent — prudent even if only for the sake of their love ! But who 
obeys — who can obey that mandate ? There is something in love itself 
which takes policy out of the most politic head — and floods the veins 
with childlike heedlessness. Love is so necessary to the lover's exists 
ence — so vital an air to him, that it seems as if all around him must be 
loving too, and if so, that they can have no time and as little heart, to 
meddle with his happiness. 

One night, Zilpha stole out by the kitchen and the back porch, from 
the glum society of her four elder " sisters." Two of them were busily 
engaged in rocking separate cradles, each containing a young Salmudy 
of nearly the same age ; another was knitting stockings for her part of 
the family feet ; and another was reading the " Deseret News' " report of 
Brother Brigham's last sermon, which a face-ache had kept her from 
hearing with her fleshly ears. Such of the children as were not married 
and permanently out of the house, or in the cradles biting the gum ring 
of infancy, were either in bed up-stairs in a sort of phalansterian nursery, 
or out in town somewhere at social or religious meetings, or engaged in 



548 APPENDIX. 

the favorite rural occupation of New England male-evenings, which hag 
survived the transit of the Rocky Mountains, seated around a stove with 
their feet on the fender ring, squirting tobacco juice between the legs, or 
joining with idiomatic old men in muzzy fur caps, talking politics and 
relating reminiscences. The women folks and the one inadequate astral 
lamp on the centre-table seemed one and all to need fresh filling if they 
were ever to be expected to shed light on anything, and difTused about 
them such an atmosphere of dejection that one would think they might 
have sufficiently well understood why a bright little girl like Zilpha could 
not stand it any longer in the room with them. Evidently, however, the 
tallest and stiffest sister could not accept these facts as sufficient to ac 
count for Zilpha's retreat, since she folded up her " Deseret News " with 
spinster-like precision, and followed the junior wife out like a chaperone. 
She was too late to find her in the kitchen or on tlie porch. 

The moon was at its second quarter and shed the peculiar, uncertain 
lunar twilight characteristic of that phase ; melting into each other the 
lines which at the planet's full come out silver-edged and distinct as 
strands of filagree ; the very light for lover's meetings, since it does not 
betray them to their enemies like the broader radiance, but tinges their 
faces to each other with a sweet enamoring mystery, and reveals them 
with a tender half-disclosure which leaves room for the imagination, 
always delighting in the adornment of the beloved with its own ideals, to 
make every feature and expression thrice beautiful, thus giving a new 
meaning to the poet's words, — 

" As darkness shows us worlds of light 
We never saw by day." 

After the elder girt his loins and fared on his mission, Hiram had 
constructed a little wicket in the fence between the Salmudys' and his 
father's garden like that which existed on the side toward the Crandalls. 
Toward this, through the half-moonlight, Zilpha made her way. Hiram 
stood ready to open it for her. He led her in, latched it after her, put 
his arm around her waist, and led her down the gravel walk to the shade 
of the acacias. For an hour they sat murmuring into each other's ears 
the sweetest words that are ever spoken on earth ; they forgot time, 
space, earth, all but the heaven of an immeasurable love that even on the 
outer sill of its vestibule had no place for an elder of fifty with four other 
wives. Before the last good-night embrace, a pair of those red, vengeful 
eyes, by aid of which the Church is omniscient, turned away fi-om the 
sight of the young lovers' rapture, which for the last half-hour they had 
been burning through the shrubbery to mark and chronicle. They 
turned away, and a pair of stealthy, cat-like feet with them, just in time ; 
for, stricken with sudden consciousness, and thinking that they heard a 
noise near the house, the two arose from beneath the shadow of the aca- 
cia, and hastened to the wicket. Just in time, for as they reached it, a 



APPENDIX. 649 

gaunt dark figure unseen by them, got safely within the screening dark- 
ness of the elder's back porch. After breakfast the next morning, the 
lady who was reading the " Deseret News " on the night before, called upon 
the bishop of the ward, who complaisantly granted her an hour's private 
interview. All such readers as are too sensitive or squeamish to bear the 
whole truth regarding Mormonism, whatever depths of moral ugliness it 
may disclose,, will please dismount from my narrative at this stopping- 
place ; and, while I pursue the main road, cross the stile, and make a 
short cut by turning over a leaf, to meet me and get aboard again a few 
paragraphs on. 

Neither Zilpha nor Hiram know that their secret has been discovered. 
The former goes on with his business, the latter performs her share in 
the household duties of the absent elder's menage — they both meet and 
part as blithely as ever. To be sure, the young girl sees sour looks 
Ibllowing her everywhere from those whom it is a Mormon " triumph of 
grace " to call " sisters " ; but then she always received those, and hav- 
ing at the commencement made up her mind to pay no attention to them, 
is not now troubled by the question of more or less. As for Hiram, 
neither in human face, nor word, nor deed — neither in his own thought, 
nor in outside warning — is there anything to tell him that the Philistines 
are upon him. 

Now it is the full of the moon — a fortnight after that sweet secret 
meeting under the acacias — and he has a long walk to take for the as- 
sistance of his father's business. Old Brother Polypeith has to pay a 
note to-morrow, and Hiram must go on a collecting tour to the outskirts of 
Salt Lake City on the Camp Floyd Road. He promises the old couple 
that he will be back by eleven o'clock at the furthest. They need not sit 
up for him after that. If he comes back later, he will stop at a friend's 
of his who lives on the southern suburb. 

He carries nothing with him but his locusl^switch, — a mere sapling, 
not for use, but for ornament ; his revolvers are left behind, hanging at 
the head of his bedstead — why should he take any weapon ? He has 
no personal enemies, and it is the Mormon's boast that Salt Lake City is 
safer after dark than any town of its size east of the Rocky Mountains. 
Moreover, the full moon makes it as light as day, and if, in all the Mor- 
mon Zion, there could be such a lusus naturce as a robber or an assassin, 
he cei'tainly would not select this time of the month to ply his nefarious 
trade. If he whistles as he walks, therefore, it is because he remembers 
a favorite tune which Zilpha used to sing under the acacia when the 
"Mormonicles " and " Mormoniculesses " were married in play : — 
" Thus the farmer sows his seeds ; 
He stands erect and takes his ease, — 
Stamps his foot and claps his hands, 
Turns around, and thus he stands ! " 

The air is full of blithe influences. He walks as if by will, without 



550 APPENDIX. 

muscle, singing and whistling by turns — full of a pleasant peace, and 
always thinking of Zilpha. He bows now and then to an acquaintance, — 
once or twice speaks to an intimate one. Everybody likes him — every- 
body seems kind to him. When was there a boy not yet twenty years 
old, who had made so many friends and no enemies ? What a pleasant 
moonlight this is I There are no clouds over it here, in the summer sky, 
as there are at the East. He looks up at it and walks unconsciously — 
his feet on the earth — his heart in the heavens. What if Elder Sal- 
mudy should never come home? The sea is dangerous. But then, 
even if he does come home, the same power which sent him on a mis- 
sion can take away from his horrible old bear-paws the one ewe-lamb 
that has been his — Hiram's very own from the beginning. That is one 
blessing 1 Brigham is good about divorces. What a sweet little home 
they can have by and by 1 

" Waiting for a partner ! 
Waiting for a partner! 
Open the ring and let her in, 
And kiss her when you've got her in! " 

He stops whistling again to twifie the Wistaria and Madeira vine, the 
wild honey-suckle and the passion-flower about the porch of that sweet 
little home they shall have — when — when — and then, thinking when, 
he goes oifinto a reverie too sweetly transcendental to put into words. 

The town's thickest streets are reached ; he observes for the first time 
how lonely it can be, — how dark and hidden in a secluded suburb, even 
under the full moon. Two furlongs off he can see the house where he 
must present his largest bill ; its candles sending out through the panes 
two red streaks to struggle with the great silver flood, and finally get 
lost, utterly beaten out in the ocean dropping down from on high. Long 
shadows of barns, black as midnight for all the moon, — nay, by reason 
of the moon, whose contrast they are, — lie across the road ; and the sand- 
heaps along the fences, but half-lighted through the picket-slits and rail- 
gaps, are checkered with oblongs of swarthy penumbra. Though the 
moon is so bright above, she leaves spots below in which it is dark 
enough for murder to be done. There is an eddy of blackness behind 
that corner ranch, long ago deserted in the troublous " Johnston times," 
where a corpse might drift ashore out of the silver stream that washed 
the road-way, and though a procession passed all night long, not be 
seen till morning. 

" Now you are married, j'ou must obey " — 

Scarce has he again begun to whistle the old memories back from un- 
der the acacia, when — " Phiu-u I phiu-u-u 1 — phiew 1 " there comes 
a triple whistle from another mouth, and of a sharper shrillness. An- 
other, like it, answers it from out that black hollow, where all mid- 
night and blackness seem hiding from the moon ; then the lad hears a 



APPENDIX. 551 

rush of feet, then a sack is thrown over his head, his mouth is stuifed 
with a wad of rags, and with pinioned arms he is dragged he knows not 
whither, as in a nightmare. 

Brother and Sister Polypeith sit cosily chatting on their door-step until 
after the appointed hour. It is past eleven ; neighbors have come in and 
joined them — gone home, and been succeeded by others who in their 
turn went home. The good old couple finally resolve to shut up the 
house. They are prepared for the alternative of Hiram's failure to 
return. He has probably, say they, spent the night at Brother Labys, 
with Joe. So they enter the homestead and bar the door ; sure that their 
boy will find it no hardship in such a summer night as this, to nestle 
down in the hay, if he does come back after all. For a little while, 
tender-hearted Ma Polypeith lies awake to hear her boy slam the gate ; 
but that sound failing her, and her conscience troubling her naught, she 
presently gives over watching and sleeps the sleep of the just. 

Tlie next morning they take their lonely breakfast with regret ; but 
certainly without alarm at Hiram!s absence. There is no doubt about 
Papa Polypeith's debtors, and if Hiram has stayed to breakfast with the 
Labys, he will go right round to the shop with the checks in time for his 
father to meet the notes. So saying, Pa Polypeith lights his after-break- 
fast pipe and by the side of Ma Polypeith strolls down the front gravel- 
walk to the gate, intending to saunter leisurely down to his Main street 
place of business. 

His hand is on the latch-rod, when an old and coarse-looking ranch 
wagon stops in front of his house. A Mormon ranchman, who sits on a 
board in front, reins in his mules with one hand, and silently beckons 
with the other. Hay, wood, vegetables, an order for cabinet ware ; these 
are the ideas that flash through Pa Polypeith's mind in an instant. But 
no ! The contents of the wagon are too meagre for produce, and the 
ranchman does not look like a saint well-to-do enough to want fresh fur- 
niture for his house. The wagon-load is only about six feet by two and 
a half, and it is covered with an old quilt. Pa Polypeith advances. 
" Well ? " says he to the ranchman. That person simply points with 
the unoccupied hand over his shoulder. Then Pa Polypeith steps up 
on a spoke and turns down the quilt. The next moment he falls from 
the spoke and grasps the side-board with both hands. " What is it ? " 
cries Ma Polypeith, curiously. She only sees his back ; and the white 
horror, that makes his face suddenly unmeaning, has spread into his very 
heart and throat, making him so bloodless that he cannot answer. She 
sees that something strange is under the quilt. She runs out and lifts it 
for herself. She gives a bitter cry that might tear the heart of a hyena — 
a devil — anything but a theocracy ; and climbing into the cart, with a 
man's strength takes up to her breast her only boy. 

Dead ! is he ? 

No I O God, no ! Worse ! For as the strength which was not quite bled 



552 APPENDIX. 

out of him while he lay in that eddy out of the moonlight just enables 
him to say, he has suffered the most fiendish wrong which Hell can 
invent — the wrong after which the leaving of life itself, is a demoniac 
refinement of wickedness. The theocracy has inflicted on him that ven- 
geance which was inflicted on Abelard by the uncles of Eloise — has 
robbed him of manhood's self because he loved his rightful wife, even in 
the clutches of a wretch who had four wives already 1 

Hiram lived — most horrible part of the story — he lived ! Two months 
pass by but he did not leave the house. Others who had suffered from 
the theocracy like him, went crawling like lepers along the shady 
side of the Salt Lake streets, ashamed to meet their kind. But he 
would never know the scorn of men. The shock which his mind had 
suffered had made him a confirmed idiot. The horrible truth was slow 
in coming to the ears of the only woman he had ever loved in his life. 
But it did come, and the next morning she was found quite beyond the 
reach of the sour-faced " sister " who had done her duty to the Church, 
beyond Elder Salmudy, beyond the bishop, beyond the theocracy itself, 
with an empty laudanum bottle by her side, and her soul under trees 
more unfading than the acacias ; all of which was delicately referred to 
in a paragraph in the " Deseret News," headed " Terrible affliction of an 
absent missionary, — Brother Salmudy." 

Mr. Polypeith was by no means a young man when he came to Utah, 
and this crowning trouble of his hfe aged him to such a degree that the 
most intimate of his Eastern friends would not have known him. (Here 
the reader, who from motives of delicacy has objected to knowing the 
worst of Mormonism, may remount the car of my narrative.) The coun- 
try which he had fondly hoped to make his Paradise, had become his In- 
ferno. He could not endure the sight of a face that he had known in 
Utah. The people he met on the street seemed to stare at him sidelong, 
with cold curiosity, or humbling pity. He had no heart for his work — 
he missed the deft hand, the cheery whistle, the sunny face that used 
to be beside him. He should never, never, never have any child to suc- 
ceed him in his business now. Everything he now did, was only for 
two broken old people, who would soon be in their graves. Why 
should he work to keep up a business which could be left to no one ? 
Neither he nor Mother Polypeith had any interest in themselves. All 
that they wanted -was the chance to scrape together enough of their 
property to leave a comfortable trust fund for the support of their poor 
wrecked boy when they should be gone ; and to get into some quiet 
place where none of them should be known ; where, without notice, they 
might nurse and tend him while they lived, and, seeing him provided for, 
lay their tired bones in the earth. 

So Mr. Polypeith sold his warehouse, stock, good-will, tools and all, 
and began making ready to go to California. There he might purchase 
some quiet little ranch, along the upper waters of the Merced or the 



APPENDIX. 563 

Sacramento, and lead the secluded life of a vaquero. He knew nothing 
of agriculture, — he was too old to learn ; but comparatively little train- 
ing was necessary for the pastoral life, and the three of them could 
live on the proceeds of the yearly cattle sales, which was all that he now 
aimed at or cared for. 

Of course he could not make this resolution known. He distrusted his 
very daughters. They had become so identified in all their interests with 
the theocracy, and that vast power so entirely swallowed up all private 
relations, obliterated all personal and family ties, that he was not sure, 
poor old man, that even these children of his own loins — these sisters 
of a worse than murdered brother — would be faithful to his secret. They 
might not be able to, even if they would ; their husband was high in the 
Church ; one of those whose duty it is to know everything, and he prob- 
ably possessed means of marital pressure which could extort the truth 
from the two girls, Uke a Spanish torture-boot or thumbscrew. So it 
would be not only wiser for the three who were going, but more merciful 
to those left behind, if he kept the fact of his intended flight a profound 
secret even from them ; so they might honestly say they had no knowl- 
edge of it, and be spared a great deal of trouble. 

Nothing of his property now remained unconverted into the portable 
shape, except the house he lived in. After much casting about for a way 
to turn this into money without exposing himself to the suspicion of 
meditating an exodus (and he needed every cent he could raise for the 
accomplishment of his purposes), he finally hit upon a way by which, as 
he congratulated himself, he could secure the double end of saving all he 
owned, and, at the same time, lull any suspicions which might have been 
aroused in the omniscient mind of the theocracy, by the somewhat hasty 
and unexpected sale of his business. A rich neighbor, Elder Steatite, 
had repeatedly solicited him to sell his house, and still retained his fancy 
for it, keeping open the original very liberal off'er he had made for it ; and 
signifying his readiness to close on cash terms whenever ]\Ir. Polypeith 
should change his mind. To Brother Steatite, Brother Polypeith now 
repaired, and told him that as he had sold out his business, finding it too 
much care for his growing years, he wanted to purchase a ranch, 
already stocked, in the Tuilla Valley, where he might settle down com- 
fortably as an agriculturist for the remainder of his life. For this, he 
needed money, and if Brother Steatite would lend him something less 
than the sum he had offered to buy the house outright, he would give 
him a mortgage on the latter property to be exchanged for a deed in case 
he found anything in Tuilla to suit him. Brother Steatite was pleased 
with this opportunity of getting at least a contingent hold on the property, 
and loaned him what was a pretty fair price for it. 

It was agreed in the secret consultations of the sorrowful old couple, that 
they should move such portions of their household goods as they found 
desirable to take with them, by slow degrees, to a " cache," or hidden place 



554 APPENDIX. 

of deposit, among the sage brush and rocks, a few rods oflF the emigrant 
road that led by the way of Black Rock ; and whenever a trusty teamster 
could be found in the trains that weekly, in some seasons almost daily, 
camped outside the city, he should be let into the secret of the cache, and 
hired to slop and take up the articles hidden there ; and then carry them 
on with him, and leave them in store at one of the Humboldt settlements, to 
be called for by the Polypeiths as they went through. Accordingly, one 
by one they moved the few things which they could, without attracting 
attention to their absence, Mr. Polypeith depositing one lot in the cache 
each time that he went on his pretended prospecting tour to Tuilla. 
Finally, having removed all they dared, they made ready to go them- 
selves. They had, fortunately, bought a team of mules and a large 
wagon for lumbering purposes, two years before, when an unusual run of 
good luck had given them the means and awakened in them the ambition 
to extend their business, — so the purchase of that essential requisite was 
not now to add another to the chances of having their flight suspected. 

They stocked their wagon with provisions for two months ; taking the 
most condensed form of everything which they could get : such as canned 
meats, fruit and vegetables, prepared milk and coffee. Shaker apple-sauce, 
hard-tack, and soup-biscuit. Though the expense of their outfit was 
considerably greater than if they had taken the ordinary salt pork and 
beef, they were able thus to provide for a much longer journey ; and in- 
sured themselves against the disaster of running short on the terrible tract 
which they must cross between Salt Lake and the fertile country about 
Lassen's, 

They came to their last Sunday in Salt Lake. At first, it seemed as if 
they could not bring themselves to go to the Tabernacle, for they should 
see the girls there ; and how could they look in those faces which had 
nestled against her bosom, and his bearded cheek, in the perfect trust 
of babyhood — how could they clasp those hands which had tenderly 
stroked their hair ; and hear the voices which had cooed up at them out 
of the cradle — knowing that it was for the last time, yet not disclosing it 
to them, in cries of heart-rending agony ? But they must do it, somehow. 
The care of poor Hiram had kept them at home a good deal on recent 
Sundays ; and the theocracy of Mormonism, like that of the Jews and 
the old Puritans, lays a severe penalty on absentees from service. Mr. 
Polypeith had once before, when his wife and children were ill for six 
weeks with typhoid fever, been put on the list of suspects, and possibly 
disloyal persons, who were to be dragooned with the sharp end of 
the Episcopal crook into worshipping God, and to be roundly fined for 
their past delinquencies. They could ill afford now to incur suspicion 
or expense ; so Mrs. Polypeith went to have her heart lacerated in the 
morning, and Mr. Polypeith in the evening. 

The principal morning sermon was delivered by the Prophet himself, 
and had for its subject, the Church's absolute proprietorship in all that 



APPENDIX. 655 

its members have or are. Brigham took as his text, " Ye are bought 
with a price ; " and his aim was to make his flock feel grateful that the 
Church was graciously pleased to accept tithes of what they possessed, 
instead of stripping them naked, as it had an undoubted Divine right to 
do, skinning them afterwards to tan their hides. After sermon, the prophet 
told his flock further, that it had been revealed to him from on high that he 
must raise a militia regiment of able-bodied saints for the protection of 
the Territory against invasion from those children of hell, the Gentile 
soldiery ; and that the necessity of equipping them, and purchasing the 
most reliable kind of shooting-irons for their use, would compel him to 
levy on them an extra assessment beside the tithes already paid this 
year — it would probably amount to one fifth the amount usually collected 
in tithing. Whatever it was, he knew his people would hearken to the 
voice of the Lord ; and he wished that they might be prepared. Nobody 
grumbled or pulled a wry countenance. These extra assessments to 
cover suddenly arising needs of the Church were of too frequent occur- 
rence to be regarded as any particular annoyance. The people's chronic 
religious complaint in Utah, is hemorrhage of the portmonnaie. 

After elaborating tliis theme a little further, Brigham suddenly changed 
his voice to a sterner tone, and a look of grim solemnity settled in his 
face, which would not have done discredit to Balfour of Burley. 

" Brother Spotsby," — said he, addressing the bishop in whose ward the 
Polypeiths lived, — "I have something to say to you which makes me 
very sorry. In your flock there is a goat who must be separated from the 
sheep ; in your garden there is a root of bitterness which must be plucked 
up, lest many thereby become defiled ; in your division of the body of 
professors of religion, is one who must be delivered over to the buffetings 
of Satan. I can stand an open enemy ! I can endure even one of those 
sneaking Gentiles in Kossuth hat, roundabout with braided sleeves, 
skim-milk blue pants, and brass soldier buttons, — those wolves who have 
entered the fold of the faithful, down to Camp Floyd, — I can bear any- 
body that hates the Lord's truth right straight out, fair and square ; but 
I cannot away with an apostate ! Brother Spotsby, there is a man in 
your ward who must be dealt with without budging I He seeks to defraud 
the inheritance of the Lord ; he must meet the fate of Ananias and Sap- 
phira ! Before we meet again in this place, he must be sent to hell 'cross 
lots ! Brother Spotsby, after meeting you may come round to my office, 
and I will further impart to you the revelation in this matter." 

Though this speech moved the assembly somewhat more than it had 
been moved by the news of an extra assessment, their emotion was but a 
trifling and transient ripple compared with that thundering and rocking 
breaker of feeling, like the bore of some East Indian river, which would 
have swept over the same body of men and women at the East who should 
hear such words and understand their full purport. There were some 
there, and among these was Mrs. Polypeith — some women, children, and 



556 APPENDIX. 

new-comers into the blessedness of the Saint's Rest, to whom the speech 
was figurative ; to whom it wholly and simply portended excommunica- 
tion, with its attendant isolation from sympathy, its outlawry, and all the 
evils which may easily be imagined as attendant upon it in a new and 
sparsely settled country, where men are so mutually dependent for the 
safety and happiness of every hour. But many — most, indeed, of 
those who heard the prophet's address to the bishop — knew that it meant 
the slaughter of one of their fellow-men ; the cool premeditated, pitiless 
killing of a human being (he might be a stranger to some of them, but 
was also doubtless the intimate friend of some), for the crime, not of 
taking another's life into his private hands, not even of sinning against 
his neighbor's rights of property ; for nothing that violated natural justice 
or social order, but for changing his mind ! — for coming to the conclu- 
sion after a long experience, it might be, of such doubts, perplexities, and 
trials as had agitated many a breast in that multitude, that Mormon- 
ism was not God's truth, but the Devil's lie ! And now, when the tear- 
less, merciless, unreasoning, irresponsible Sanhedrim of his rulers was to 
prove he was right in this conclusion by slaying him, there was not a 
man in all that theocracy-ridden assembly stirred enough to rise and 
protest against the crime of his brother's blood ! They were all old to 
such impressions ; they had heard and known such things until every 
man's heart was calloused ; though once the wave of passionate indigna- 
tion which swept them, listening to a speech like the prophet's, in its 
surging rebound, must have swept th^ Avhole fabric and personality of 
Mormonism into the night and darkness from which they came at first. 
Thus did the old Jews sit and see Achan murdered with all his innocent 
family ; thus did the young man Saul stand by and witness the stoning 
of Stephen, holding the assassins' clothes and consenting to the martyr's 
death; thus did the old Puritan behold the tender flesh of women 
seethe and crackle in the fires of the stake, — uttering no cry of horror, 
feeling no tear wet his stony cheeks ; and thus do men lose the humanity 
and the divinity of their natures under a theocracy everywhere. 

Mrs. Polypeith, as I have said, never dreamed of the meaning which 
really lay in the prophet's speech. Possibly she thought that the pro- 
posed excommunicate might be her husband — but he had already 
resolved to excommunicate himself; and before the sentence could be 
promulgated, he and she with their poor boy, would be where such a sen- 
tence was mere empty wind. So, in her tenderness for a heart already 
too heavily weighted, she carried home no account of Brigham's speech. 
Besides, she knew as well as anybody can know, in a country where one 
hardly dare trust his own sister for fear she may be a spy, that there 
were several malcontents in the ward beside her husband ; some of them 
comparatively reckless and much more prominent : the person referred to 
might be one of these. 

The partings were over ; the old couple had not betrayed themselves 



APPENDIX. 5i7 

to their daughters. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday had gone, and in the 
darkness of Wednesday morning, about one o'clock, the three Poly- 
peiths left their Mormon home forever. They drove slowly through the 
town, so as to attract no straggler who might be awake at that hour ; 
and were soon on the desolate plain beyond the fens of the Jordan. 
Here they dared to go more rapidly, and before dawn broke, had reached 
the shore of the Lake and passed the point of the Oquirrh. Still they 
did not tarry. They might have aroused some one as they passed Black 
Rock Ranch, and they felt like guilty people fleeing from a murder; 
they trembled at every sound of the lake plashing along its stony beach, 
and the stunted cedars took the shape of crouching men. To think that 
these were American citizens, in United States territory, who had vio- 
lated no natural right, no law of their country, and yet they were obliged 
to move thus ! Let us not look abroad for the missionary objects of 
Republicanism. Austria, a more terrible Austria than that which crushed 
Venice, is nourished at our own breast. 

The Polypeiths had seen an emigrant train bound for Oregon pass 
through the city about noon of the day before. They were in hopes of 
reaching it some distance this side of the Tuilla settlements ; of merging 
themselves in it, and so travelling on unnoticed by any of the Mormon 
ranchmen, who, seeing them alone, might possibly identify them as be- 
longing to Salt Lake, until they had got safely across the boundaries of 
Utah. A little before sunrise, the mules began to lag ; and poor Hiram 
awakened from the vacant melancholy which now habitually shrouded 
him, to moan for food like a child. So, driving a few hundred yards off 
the track. Father Polypeith picketed his mules to a pair of stout sage 
stalks, to let them browse for a couple of hour?, and building a fire of the 
scrubby sage brush and grease-wood he had collected with his hatchet, 
assisted his wife to prepare breakfast. While they were eating this meal, 
the two congratulated each other on the thought that before noon, they 
would in all probability come up with the train and be comparatively out 
of danger. Their old hearts glowed with a momentary warmth ; they 
pictured to themselves the quiet nook which they might reach in California, 
and though it was only a place to die in, still they had suffered such entire 
loss of all which brightened life, that this prospect was a kind of substi- 
tute for happiness. The sun was two hours high, when they again put 
the mules in the wagon and resumed their journey. 

They had travelled but a couple of miles further, when they came upon 
fresh tracks ; and presently they saw the still smoking ash-heap which 
indicated a recent camping-place. Here the train had probably made 
its night-halt, and from the looks of the fire and the hoof-marks, it could 
not be very long since it started out again. They took fresh courage, 
chirruped to their mules, and went on as briskly as the sandy road and 
their heavy wagon would permit. Rising a little hillock, they had their 
eyes rejoiced, by seeing through the clear, dry air, which, on these plains, 



558 APPENDIX. 

everywhere out of the immediate neighborhood of the Lake, has a sort of 
telescopic property, a long white serpent whose joints were wagons, taper- 
ing from the nearer rear to the far-off van, slowly winding under a thin 
tawny cloud of dust, and through the gray sage about two miles before 
them, toward the Tuilla Valley. Their hearts leapt into their throats 
with the joyful thought of such close safety ; they laughed like children ; 
even poor Hiram seemed to understand them, and snapped his fingers 
over his shoulder, as if defying the Saints and the whole theocracy they 
had left snoring behind them in Salt Lake City. 

Descending the opposite slope of the hillock they lost sight of the 
train, but knowing that every step brought them nearer it, considering 
the leisurely way in which emigrants travel, it kept its place as a stimu- 
lant in their fancy's eye, and they cheerfully pushed their mules through 
the sand, sure of overtaking their escort before it reached Tuilla. Their 
way now led through a narrow pass, with a low rocky ledge projecting 
from the bench-land on either side of them, shaggy with sage, and broken 
into fantastic crags and notches. Mr. Polypeith sat alone on a cush- 
ioned board across the front of the wagon ; his wife and son were comfort- 
ably lodged upon bags and mattresses under the tilt, with a pile of boxed 
household wares for the back to their seat. Just as they turned the 
corner of the pass and were again emerging upon the open sage plain, 
a sharp crack, and " ping ! " broke the golden morning stillness ; the 
old man's hands went up and the reins fell from them ; then, without a 
word, he fell backward into the wagon, while a red rivulet trickled over 
his temple and dropped from his gray hairs into the lap of his wife. 
With a shriek that might have pierced a fiend's heart, she caught him 
to her breast and dragged him back upon the mattress, — sprung to the 
board and caught the reins ; but before she could lash the team into a 
gallop two bull-necked wretches with painted faces had seized them close 
by the bits, and drawing each his revolver, fiercely ordered her to dis- 
mount. But strength failed her. Her brain reeled ; and only less dead 
than her husband, she fell upon his stiffening body, clasping Hiram in 
her arms. The assassins drew the mules to the side of the road, secured 
them, and entered the wagon. They lifted the dead man and threw him 
out into the brush as if he had been the carcase of a beast. Then they 
tore the boy from his mother's unconscious grasp, and sneering at his 
blank face of mindless terror, tumbled him to the ground after his father. 
Not even age and the helplessness of woman found mercy from them. The 
mother was dragged from the wagon after the son, and pitched in a limp, 
unresisting heap upon the corpse. Hiram, ignorant of all that was 
doing, first stood and looked curiously on his prostrate parents, then 
obeying the instinct of mere animal fear, turned to flee into the sage. 
One of the assassins deliberately raised his pistol, and as he was running, 
shot him through the back. As he lay weltering in blood and struggling 
in his death-agony, his moans pierced through his mother's unconscious- 



APPENDIX. 559 

ness and reached her heart. She began to show signs of returning from 
her swoon. 

" Look out, Bill ! " spoke one of the Danites hurriedly ; " the old 
woman's a-comin' to. Why not make a job of it ? — sfie's no use ! 
What'll we do with her, anyhow ? " 

•' That's so ! " replied the other. " We can't take her back ; there's 
nowhere for her to go to, and she'll raise worse hell with the Gentiles than 
any o' the tribe, you bet. I believe it's only doin' the Church justice, 
and her a mercy, to send her to Californy too, alonger the rest 'o 'em. 
Here goes, anyhow " — 

She had opened her eyes and raised herself on one palm ; in this posi- 
tion, looking out of glassy, unmeaning, bedazed eyes, like one waking 
from a nightmare. The last speaker coolly put his revolver to her ear, 
pulled the trigger, and the last of the Polypeiths had forever escaped 
from the theocracy. The Danites dragged the three bodies out a hun- 
dred rods into the brush, made a great heap of sage and grease wood, 
laid their victims on it, and setting the whole on fire, calmly sat near and 
smoked their pipes, making blasphemous jokes the while, till every 
earthly trace of their crime was consumed. This final act of the horrible 
tragedy over, they turned the heads of the mules and drove them back 
toward Salt Lake, arriving there the next day. The wagon and its con- 
tents went into the Church store-house, to be sold ; while the entire sum 
of money resulting from the conversion of the Polypeiths' property, 
found in a belt around the old man's body, was passed directly into the 
iron safe in the Prophet's office. The married daughters only knew that 
their parents and their brother had fled from Utah ; — whither they went, 
how far they had gone, and what had become of them, they never 
learned, for the Church not only allows its members to have no secrets 
from itself, but keeps all its own as inscrutably as the Sphinx. Thus ends 
the story of the Polypeiths. And the promise which I made when I 
began it, I can now assert that I have kept. I have made not one single 
statement which is either false or exaggerated ; have supposed nothing 
to happen whose parallel has not repeatedly happened in Utah. 

If the wholesale assassination of the Polypeiths stagger the belief of 
any calm Republican Christian, dwelling at the East without the pale of 
theocracy, what will he think of the massacre, universally known in 
Utah, of a whole wagon-train of emigrants on their way to California ? 
I have before referred to this bloody affair, and will now briefly fulfill 
my promise to give its details. 

In May, 1857, Parley Pratt, one of the family whose name figures so 
conspicuously in the Mormon annals, — a man of superior education and 
marked ability, who has contributed many hymns besides numerous other 
productions to the literature of the Latter-Day Church, — was slain in Van 
Buren County, Arkansas, by a citizen of that State named Hector McLean, 
for having proselyted McLean's wife and taken her to himself, during 
his apostleship in the Cherokee Nation Country. 



560 APPENDIX. 

This act, and the fact that McLean was largely aided in the pursuit 
and capture of his insulter by residents of that part of Arkansas, greatly 
incensed the Mormons against the people of that State, and determined 
them upon taking speedy vengeance for the killing of Pratt, who was very 
popular in Utah. 

Their opportunity did not arrive until the next autumn. On the 4th 
of September a train of 150 Arkansas emigrants, compi'ising many entire 
families, on their way to California, with about sixty wagons, a large herd 
of horses, mules, and beef-cattle, and the entire stock of household goods, 
provisions, and merchandise for barter, usually carried by such trains, 
amounting in value, as was estimated, to nearly $200,000, reached a 
spring and camping-ground at the west end of the Mountain Meadow 
Valley. Here they were surprised and attacked, while corraling their 
stock inside a circle of wagons, as is customary when on the halt, by an 
overwhelming force of men in the garb and paint of Indians. Here I 
must digress a little for explanation. 

In every Mormon settlement the traveller finds a number of men with 
long black hair, dark skins, and black eyes, whose slouching gait, sidelong, 
restless look, and entire style of make-up so suggest the native savage 
that he might easily mistake them for half-breeds tamed to the life of a 
white community. They are in reality pure-blooded white men, be- 
longing to the Mormons, and selected on account of their strong natural 
resemblance to Indians, as well as their love of adventure and skill in 
adapting themselves to savage modes of living, as go-betweens, to con- 
duct the intercourse of the Mormons with the tribes, whom they pretend 
to regard as former true believers, and call by the pretentious title of 
their Laraanite brethren. These men usually know several of the Indian 
languages, are enured to fatigue, fine fighters and hunters, cunning 
in every branch of forest-craft, acquainted with the mountain trails as 
thoroughly as the Indians themselves, and devote themselves especially 
to keeping up friendly relations with the savages ; part of the time living 
in their dens with them, making them presents contributed by the 
Church, conciliating them in every way, and in many instances acquiring 
unbounded influence over them. Whenever the Mormons want a cat's- 
paw for purposes so nefarious that their own appearance on the stage of 
accomplishment would make them obnoxious to the whole world ; when 
they want an exploring party cut off, a mail rifled, a Gentile settlement 
raided on, or wholesale assassination and plunder committed, these men 
have only need to stain their faces, strip themselves to skin hunting-shirt, 
or breech-clout and moccasins, and drumming up a sufficient party of 
the savages they have brought under their control, to lead them out to 
loot and massacre. I believe that in the earlier part of this work I have 
referred to atrocious expeditions of this kind in which (as in the Sweet- 
water raids, for example) a large number of the seeming Indians, undis- 
tinguishable from true savages in any other respect, were detected to be 



APPENDIX. 561 

Mormons, from their using German, Irish, and other white brogues in con- 
versing with each otlier during the onslaught. Such, at least in large 
part, were the Indians who attacked the emigrants at Mountain Meadow. 

For about a day the brave Arkansians kept off their murderers by- 
lying behind their embanked bales and boxes, with their wagons corraled 
in a circle around them, their women and children inside of this rude 
extempore fortification ; and using their rifles vigorously all the time. 
Their enemies however had much the best of them, for they could lie 
almost entirely out of sight in the brush, and were besides between the 
emigrants and water, so that the latter and their families suifered 
severely from thirst. Still, though vastly their supei'iors in number, the 
savages did not gain an inch. They would probably have been obliged 
to retire disheartened without accomplishing their object, had not some 
of the Mormons thought of a stratagem by which they succeeded as they 
never could have done by force. 

Just at this juncture, the beleaguered Arkansians had their eyes glad- 
dened by the sight of an approaching body of white men, who had not before 
appeared on the scene, and seemed to be strangers crossing the mountains 
and wholly unconnected with the attacking party. After a parley with 
the Indians, the latter ceased firing long enough to let them go into the 
emigrant camp and have an interview. They told the Arkansians that 
they were settlers in the neighborhood who had always conciliated and 
been friends with the Indians, and that they possessed so much influence 
with them that they had persuaded them to cease hostiUties and let the 
emigrants proceed under their (the whites') escort, if they would only as 
a concession to the exasperated feelings of the savages permit that escort 
to take possession of their arms and ammunition. The Indians, they said, 
had recently lost some of their most valuable men by the hand of whites, 
who murdered them in cold blood and out of sheer wantonness, so that it 
was now with the greatest difliculty they could be persuaded not to attack 
every white man they met. 

The reasoning and propositions of their new-found friends appeared so 
plausible, and their disposition so friendly, that after consultation, the 
Arkansians concluded to accept their advice, and deposited with them all 
the arms and ammunition belonging to the entire train. Scarcely had they 
stripped themselves of their means of protection, when at a prearranged 
signal, all the savages rushed in, and joined by the white men, — among 
whom the well-known Mormon Elder Haight seems to have been the 
most prominent, — began butchering the helpless men, women, and chil- 
dren ; — nor did they stop pursuing them for several miles, and keeping up 
a running fire all the way, until they had killed 120 or more of the train. 
The last of the unfortunate men managed to get to Muddy Creek, forty or 
fifty miles away, but was tracked by the insatiate devils and shot down. 
Some of the deeds of the white savages rivaled anything in the annals 
of Indian cruelty ; such, for instance, as the case of one young girl, who 



562 APPENDIX. 

was caught by the hair of her head while running, and as she knelt cry- 
ing for mercy to her Mormon captor, had his bowie-knife drawn across 
her throat from ear to ear. The smallest children, boys and girls, fi-om 
earliest infancy to ten years of age, were spared by the assassins and dis- 
persed among the settlements, to be taken into various Mormon families and 
brought up in the Mormon faith. Seventeen of these were afterward found 
by Mr. Forney, whom the government empowered to investigate the matter, 
and returned to their parents' friends in Arkansas. The wagons, cattle, and 
goods were parted among the Mormon actors in the massacre, and no suc- 
cessful effort at searching out any portion of this property had been made 
when I left Salt Lake. One wagon which had belonged to the train was 
then in the barn of a well-known Mormon citizen, and another well-to-do, 
much esteemed Saint, who had participated in the massacre and had 
taken one of the children to bring up, I met in the streets of Salt Lake 
repeatedly. He looked as jolly as you please, as if neither conscience nor 
digestion troubled him. 

The position which the United States government holds in Utah may 
be inferred from the fact that although the prominent participators in this, 
one of the blackest outrages of modern times, are perfectly well known in 
Utah, they go about among their fellow-men to this day with unblushing 
and fearless impunity. The Hon. Mr. Cradlebaugh, former delegate from 
Nevada, laid the case before Congress in a speech eloquent with terrible 
fact, and a United States Court (held I believe at Camp Floyd, under the 
protection of Johnston's guns) was convened to try the offenders, but as a 
matter of course they all slipped through. The cases had to go before 
a jury, and the panel had to be drawn from among the Mormons them- 
selves. If there happened to be one Gentile juror drawn, it was only at 
the risk of his life that he could vote guilty ; and if he did, his comrades 
would be certain to disagree with him. It is evident that until martial- 
law is proclaimed, no Mormon can ever be punished in Utah for a crime 
against a Gentile, — Gentiles having no rights there which a Mormon is 
bound to respect. I am not advocating the declaration of martial-law m 
the Territory ; of the necessity which justifies such an extreme measure 
I do not pretend to be a judge ; but I am sure that unless the United 
States intends to give over the entire Territory to the possession of a sin- 
gle sect, and virtually forbid all citizens who do not belong to that sect 
from settling in the Territory ; if it ever intends that it-s citizens shall be 
equally protected everywhere within its boundaries, their form of relig- 
ous belief notwithstanding ; if it does not intend to cede to the settlers 
of every new territory as part of their local franchise, analogous with 
state rights, the power to establish despotism more cruel than any in 
Asia or in Europe, and compel all new-comers to choose between bowing 
their necks to the yoke, being assassinated, or abandoning their claims iu 
the territory : then the United States Government will be compelled to 
take the opposite horn of the dilemma and open courts-martial in Utah for 



APPENDIX. 563 

the trial of all such desperadoes as now threaten Gentile life in Utah with 
the certainty of acquittal by a jury of their peers. 

Doubtless, trial by jury is a palladium of liberty ; but in preserving 
the palladium let us be sure that we are not holding it as a screen for 
murder to stab behind ; let us take care lest we leave no liberty for the 
palladium to shield. 

If we can sufficiently purge ourselves of indignation and other personal 
passions to look at Mormonism with the calm intellectual eyes of the 
philosopher, it will present to us the most curious object of study which 
the world at present affords. Its life is an hourly anomaly. The feet 
that the system continues to exist, is as strange a one as it would be if 
the Falls of Niagara should begin pourino; up instead of tumbling down. 
As we have sought to show, it is a violation of all moral and intellectual 
laws of gravitation. It is a perpetual defiance to the progress of the 
age. AVe are irresistibly driven to the questions, What upholds it ? 
"VVTiat has carried it through trials well-nigh as fiery as any which ever 
assaulted the Christian Church, and placed it in a position of such pros- 
perity that it is capable of setting at naught successfully the will of the 
Government, the spirit of American Republicanism and the strongest 
people upon earth ? 

Its element of cohesion is not to be found where superficial students 
usually look for it, — in the fact that its system provides full swing for the 
baser passions of mankind in the institution of polygamy. One of the 
strongest of the IMormon leaders, Colonel Kinney, is not a polygamist at 
all, and the institution itself, so far from being an original element in the 
system, is but a recent importation into it. Besides, the Mormons are by 
no means a grossly sensual people ; quite as far from that, everybody 
who has lived among them will bear them witness, as the old Puritans or 
Covenanters. Their polygamy, of course, offers opportunity for the 
gratification of sensual men without the stigma which in civilized and 
Christian countries attaches to sexual inconstancy ; but it is a stern 
religious institution, not a voluptuary one. The grace and jioetry of 
Athens, the sensuous languor of oriental lands, are entirely absent from 
it. The Mormon is a polygamist not for indulgence, but from conviction. 
He hedc^es around his many marriages with a sterner legislation than that 
with which we protect our one. He man-ies repeatedly, because every 
time he is adding to his importance, elevating his position in the hie- 
rarchy of heaven ; because every father has in the kingdom of God a 
principality proportionate to his number of children. There cannot be 
imagined any country less favorable for the residence of a voluptuary 
than Utah. There is no such thing possible as promiscuous passion in 
Salt Lake City. Not only are the statutes severer against such practices, 
but the feeling of the people is more opposed to them than in any place 
on the globe. The man who wishes many objects of his attachment, 
must marry them all, and burden himself with a responsibility at each 



564 APPENDIX. 

successive marriage for which even the most frantic sensualist could find 
no compensation. Moreover, a great mistake is frequently made at the 
East, in supposing that the " spiritual marriages," so often heard of in 
connection with the Mormons, correspond to those promiscuous and illicit 
relations gilded by Free Love with that once sacred name, and are merely 
an extension of the sensual area of the persons contracting them, with- 
out the necessity of his assuming any of the burdens of the husband. 
How impossible it is that this should be, may be perceived by putting 
together the facts that on the one hand all such relations outside the 
marriage tie are severely punished ; and when the transgressor not only 
violates social order in general, but trespasses on the close of some 
other man, that punishment takes the horrible form which (some of) my 
readers have read in the history of the Polypeiths ; and that on the other, 
a great many women in Utah are the physical and temporal wives of one 
man, the spiritual and eternal wives of another. The spiritual mar- 
riage is a ceremony of great intended solemnity, purporting to seal a 
woman to be the wife of a man after this life, — a contract and covenant 
ratified by the Church, and capable of bei.ig solemnized by Brigham 
Young alone, — that she shall form part of his celestial household and live 
with him in heaven forever. This involves no union of any kind on 
earth after the marriage ceremony is over. 

Nor is the element of strength in Mormonism any liberty of any kind, 
granted to the people of Utah, but not granted to other people elsewhere. 
The very reverse is true. The power resides in the hands of an exceed- 
ing few — really, and finally, I ought to say, in but one hand. The people, 
elsewhere in this country the sovereign people, are here the veriest creat- 
ures of despotism. They are no more a power than were the Venetians 
under Francis Joseph ; but they are ready to die in defense of the chain 
that binds them. 

The strength of Mormonism is this, — Mormonism is a one-man power. 
Mormonism is Brigham Young. The people are generally collected 
fi-om the lowest, the most credulous, the unthinking stratum of Europe. 
And Brigham Young is one of the most remarkable men of any age, of 
any country. Next to Louis Napoleon he possesses the vastest executive 
ability, the highest talent for government, which this century has seen ; 
and when I consider the disadvantages under which he has labored, his 
lack of a great name, like the elder Bonaparte's, behind him to give his 
very mistakes prestige ; his deficiency in education beyond the meagre 
help which he might receive from a common school in the early settle- 
ment of Western New York ; his being obliged to associate all his life 
with the gross, the ignorant, and the superstitious, — I do not know why I 
should make a reservation, when I speak of him superlatively, in the 
French Emperor's favor. Perhaps the best expression for the difference 
between the two would be to say, that he is Louis Napoleon plus a heart 
and intense moral convictions. There are some circumstances under 



APPENDIX. 565 

which the addition must be a despotic ruler's weakness ; but then again 
there are other cases — and in Utali, among that wild, fiercely mobile na- 
tion of fanatics, these are not few — where it is a positive advantage. 

Brigham Young's power with the Mormons is a cause of inexpressible 
astonishment to every thinking mind which visits Utah. They do not 
seem to know it ; he works their hundred and twenty thousand wires 
(for that is probably not far from the right number of his subjects), sit- 
ting at his table in his plain little office, as a telegraph operator works 
a single line with a single key. He has acquired absolute ascendency 
over them. His power is the most despotic known to mankind. The 
Mormons would think of disputing a law of nature as soon as his will ; 
and that, probably because he works like nature, without any apparent 
selfishness, without anger, but inevitably, and with an almost invariable 
result of success and general beneficence. The people amuse themselves 
with the fiction that they, like us Gentiles at the East, have a voice in 
things ; that their votes elect their officers ; that they are a represen- 
tative government. But Brigham always knows who is going to 
Congress. I asked him if Dr. Bernliisel would be likely to get into 
Congress again. " No," he replied with perfect certainty, " we shall send 
Colonel Hooper as our delegate." When the time came Brigham would 
send in his name to the " Deseret News," whose office, like everything else 
valuable and powerful, is in his inclosure. It would be printed, of 
course, — a counter-nomination is a thing unheard of among the Mor- 
mons, and the Gentile residents have not the slightest show for a candidate 
of their own, — and on election day, the man Brigham named would be 
delegate as sure as the sun rose. Here is the crack in which the lever 
must be inserted when Mormonism rushes to its suicide by challenging 
collision with the United States authority. Here may it be pried off its 
base, for no administration can be caitiff enough to hold that a congress- 
man or delegate elected in this fashion belongs to that Republican form 
of government which the Constitution guarantees to all the States. 

All Mormondom is Brigham's. As the irresponsible trustee and treas- 
urer of the Church, its first officer in all things, secular and religious, 
he possesses absolute control of all the property of the Church, — and we 
have seen how vast that property is, — including the tithe of every man's 
private property, as a matter of course, and regular ; the right at will to 
sequestrate any further proportion of such property for Church purposes ; 
the gigantic Building Fund, for a temple and any other edifices he may 
choose to erect, of whose plan, specifications, and disbursements he is 
sole arbiter; the Emigration Fund, still vaster, from which are made the 
advances necessary to bring poor pi-oselytes from all the regions of 
Europe visited by Mormon missionaries, and into which those proselytes 
after their settlement in Utah are compelled to pay back that advance, by 
instalments, to the uttermost farthing of principal and interest, in addition 
to their tithes. One's mind becomes staggered at the immensity of the 
financial interests which this single man wields unquestioned. His 



566 APPENDIX. 

supreme relation to both the secular and religious governments of Mor- 
monism and the unreporting character of such a relation, makes it 
impossible for any outsider to draw the line between his private posses- 
sions and those of the Church ; but he is for all practical purposes the 
owner of all the Church has. I heard many estimates of the amount of 
his personal fortune among those (which to be sure is not saying a great 
deal) who had as good opportunities as anybody else, and all of them 
made him by far the wealthiest man in America ; one, indeed, of the 
wealthiest men in the world. Since he has been in Utah, a single New 
York house is stated upon competent authority to have invested sixty 
millions of dollars for him in foreign securities.! The Gentiles regard this 
as an evidence of his sagacious anticipation that the whole Mormon 
fabric, so far as America is concerned, is destined to tumble in his time ; 
and that his practice of the principle " L'eglise c'est moi " is not meant 
to extend to identification with his sect's downfall. But among all the 
eyes watching him, none have ever accused him of peculation or dis- 
honesty of any kind in his office, if we disregard, as we ought, the 
mere baseless and proofless innuendoes of his avowed personal enemies. 

The mountain-stream that irrigates the city, flowing to all its fields 
and gardens, through open ditches on each side of the highway, passes 
through Brigham's inclosure ; if the Saints needed drought to humble them, 
he could back the waters to their source. The road to the only canon 
where firewood is easily attainable, runs through the same close, and 
is barred by a gate of which he has the sole key. A family-man wishing 
to cut fuel, must ask his leave, which is generally granted on condition 
that every third or fourth load be deposited in the inclosure for Church 
purposes. Thus everything vital, save the air he breathes, reaches the 
Mormon only through Brigham's sieve. What more absolute despotism 
is conceivable ? Here, again, is the pou-sto for Government interference. 
The mere fact of such power resting in one man's irresponsible hands, is 
a crime against the Constitution. At the same time, wonderful as it 
may seem, this power is controlled for the common good. His life is all 
one great theoretical mistake, yet he makes fewer practical mistakes than 
any other man, so situated, whom the world ever saw. Those he does 
make are not on the side of self He merges his whole personality in the 
Church with a self-abnegation which would establish in business a whole 
century of martyrs having a better cause. 

The people believe in him because he believes in himself He can 
slay them when they apostatize : they only quote Joshua and Achan, 
Moses and Korah, or some other bloody theocratic analogue. He may 
be privy to the Mountain Meadow affair : Samuel hewed Agag in pieces. 
He has in his Lion and Bee houses, in the Prophet's inclosure (called 
after the sculptured symbols which they bear on their central pedi- 
ments), and in other dwellings, over seventy wives after the flesh ; while 

1 His British possessions alone make him to-day (1870) the third largest depositor 
in the Bank of England. 



APPENDIX. 567 

it is so much the fashion to marry him spiritually, that he himself has no 
idea of the number of those who will share his menage in heaven, — 
many married on earth to other husbands having gone away from his 
office just after the cei-emony, never to speak to him again until the resur- 
rection. It is amusing to think how perpetually the usher at the door of 
his celestial saloon will be occupied for the first few years succeeding the 
Projihet's translation to bliss in the announcement of fresh " Mrs. Brig- 
hams." The last time anybody took the trouble to count the register, 
the number of these spiritual wives of his had run up to something like 
5,000. But with all these, and more especially the 70-75 earthly ones, 
no one thinks of calling him a sensualist. He believes in himself and his 
doctrine, so the people believe in both. He is the best and most en- 
lightened helper of all his people's industries ; he knows so well the 
worth of labor to the dignifying of the man, that a few years ago, when 
many of the poor people alter a bad season came to him almost starving, 
to ask the help of the Church funds, he set them building a clay wall 
around the city to keep out hypothetical Indians, that they might feel 
they earned the aid afforded, and not learn to eat the bread of idleness. 
What I have before stated of his ingenuity in extemporizing a home- 
made gilt chandelier for his opera-house, is true in every department of 
business. He has made himself familiar with all the resources of Utah, 
and studies night and day to make them avail to the utmost. He has 
established in the more southern part of Utah the cane, cotton, and 
indigo culture ; and I had the pleasure of seeing a beautiful silk scarf, 
which would not have done discredit to the Chinese looms, sent him as 
the first fruits of that valuable branch of industry which he had estab- 
lished near Nephi ; distributing the cocoons and treatises on rearing the 
worms, together with plans for wheels and looms, among the people in the 
neighborhood when he went there on a jireaching tour. But all these 
excellences of executive ability, this boundless versatility and activity of 
mind, do not produce one tithe the confidence in him which is awakened 
by the universal belief in his sincerity of nature. He believes so 
strongly in Mormonism and Brigham Young, that he is the magnet by 
which Joe Smith has suspended six-score thousand souls. 

Perhaps the Mormon question will ultimately settle itself without a 
collision between Utah and the Government. If Brigham Young dies, 
it will be settled speedily. He is the key-stone of the airh of Mormon 
society. While he remains, these increasing thousands of the most het- 
erogeneous souls that could be swept together from the by-ways of Chris- 
tendom will continue to be builded up into a coherent nationality. The 
instant he crumbles, Mormondom and Mormonism will fall to pieces at 
once, irreparably. His individual magnetism, his executive tact, his 
native benevolence, are all immense ; but these advantages would avail 
him little with the dead-in-earnest fanatics who rule Utah under him, 
and the entirely persuaded fanatics whom they rule, were not his quali- 



668 APPENDIX. 

ties all coordinated in this one absolute sincerity of belief and motive. 
Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite ; he is 
that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, — a man who has brought the 
loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil, who is ready 
to suffer crucifixion for Barabbas, supposing him Christ. Be sure 
that were he a hypocrite, the Union would have nothing to fear from 
Utah. AVhen he dies, at least four hostile factions, Avhich now find their 
only common ground in deification of his person, will snatch his mantle 
at opposite corners. Then will come such a rending as the world has not 
seen since the Macedonian generals fought over the coffin of Alexander ; 
and then Mormonism will go out of geography into the history of popular 
delusions. There is not a single chief, apostle, bishop, or elder, except 
Brigham, who possesses any catholicity of influence. I found this tacitly 
acknowledged in every quarter. The more enlightened, fore-looking of 
the people seem like citizens of a beleaguered town, who know they have 
but a definite amount of bread, yet have made up their minds to act while 
it lasts, as if there were no such thing as starvation. The greatest com- 
fort you can afford a Mormon is to tell him how young Brigham looks ; 
for the quick unconscious sequence is, " Then Brigham may last jut my 
time, — apres moi la deluge ! " Those who think at all deeply, have no 
conjecture of any Mormon future beyond him, and I know that many 
Mormons (Heber Kimball included) would gladly die to-day rather than 
survive him, and encounter that judgment-day and final perdition of theu* 
faith which must dawn on his new-made grave. 



